The Gate

by Bob Mayer

  The Genzai Bakudan team worked nonstop, Kuzumi remembered, toiling over the parts of the project, trying to bring it all together in the cave on the hillside overlooking the valley where most of the components were produced.

  The intelligence forwarded by TO from Nira and other agents in the United States indicated that the Americans were progressing on their Manhattan Project. In early May it was reported that the Americans had exploded a small batch of uranium with TNT as a preliminary test. Kuzumi had been glad to get the results of the American test since Genzai Bakudan could not afford that luxury; there simply wasn’t enough uranium to be spent in such a manner, even with what the Germans had brought.

  Then in July there was the rumor that the Americans had actually detonated an atomic bomb in the middle of one of their vast deserts. Security had been so tight that no Japanese or TO agent had been able to confirm or deny the rumor. Even Nira did not know. Kuzumi believed it was true and told the Genoysha that. By that time Genzai Bakudan was in its final stages. They had one bomb assembled. Kuzumi wanted to test it. He was overruled by the Navy. They only had enough uranium to make two bombs. They could not waste one on a test. He was ordered to complete the second one.

  Kuzumi had recommended that they use the one bomb anyway. Attack an American carrier task force off the coast with it. Again he was ignored. There were fears the bomb would not work and would be captured. There were also fears that the bomb would work and that the retaliation unleashed upon Japan would be even more devastating than the current state of affairs. There was concern that if the Americans had successfully tested a bomb in July, that they then might have a stockpile of atomic weapons and detonating the one Genzai Bakudan had could bring a rain of American-made atomic bombs onto Japan.

  So Kuzumi was frozen out of the decision-making process on how the bombs were to be used and spent his time putting together the second one. And that was why he had no idea where Cyclone or Forest was and where 1-24 was now. But now as Genoysha he could find out. Of that he was sure.

  CHAPTER 10

  SAN FRANCISCO

  WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER 1997 11:30 A.M. LOCAL

  Lake waited in the small foyer outside Dr. Harmon’s office. Araki had had both of them dropped off from the stealth ship at a deserted pier several miles south of San Francisco along the rough coastline there that he obviously had scouted out at some earlier time. A van was parked at a shopping center a mile inland and Araki had the keys. Lake had had Araki drop him at one of his bolt-holes in a motel where he’d caught a couple of hours sleep before taking the BART to the campus.

  Lake could only continue to marvel at the extent of the CPI’s operation. If nothing else came of this, Lake decided, he would have to alert Feliks to the capabilities of their Japanese counterparts and the ease with which they moved in the United States and the waters just off the coast. At the very least, Lake mused, as he heard the click-click of a lady’s heels come down the hallway, he might get a Gold MasterCard.

  Dr. Harmon graced Lake with a smile as she opened the door. “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she said. “You don’t look like you had the most restful night.”

  “I didn’t,” Lake said. He pointed. “I found your box and brought it back.”

  “Where did you find it?” Harmon asked as she unlocked the door to her office.

  Lake followed her in. “I don’t suppose you have any coffee?” he asked.

  “I can make a pot,” she replied, turning to one of the bookcases and uncovering an old coffeemaker from behind a pile of books.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Lake asked as she came back in with a pot full of water.

  “Only if I can join you,” she said. She took the offered cigarette. “This building is tobacco-free, as all the buildings on campus are; but no one ever really comes in here, so I think we can get away with one or two.” Her eyes narrowed. “Your hands are shaking.”

  That surprised Lake. He looked down. His hands were shaking.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  With the hiss of the water shifting through the coffeepot in the background, Lake began the story of the previous evening. He kept out many of the details, but quickly gave her a sketch of events from taking off in the helicopter to being rescued by Araki, the discovery of the messages to 1-24, and being brought to shore.

  When he was done, Harmon was shaking her head. “I don’t know whether to believe you or think that’s the most outrageous story I’ve ever heard.”

  “I don’t have any proof—” Lake began, but he paused as she raised a hand.

  “I believe you,” Harmon said.

  “What?”

  “I said I believe you. I believed you yesterday and I believe you today.”

  “Why?” Lake asked.

  Harmon smiled. “Let’s say it’s my own woman’s intuition.”

  “I don’t think that’s enough to—”

  “Would you stop?” she said. “You just can’t keep questioning everything and everyone.”

  Lake blinked as she took both his hands in hers. They felt wonderfully warm. Her eyes locked into his. “You’re alone, aren’t you? All alone?”

  Lake was so taken aback that he answered honestly. “Yes.”

  “Well, right now you’re not,” she said. Then he saw her own shoulders twitch and she withdrew her hands and the warmth was gone. “I’m a historian after all,” she added. “I know that very strange things go on all the time—the old truth-is-stranger-than-fiction line. I’m just glad you made it out alive.”

  To that Lake had no reply. He was just looking down at his hands, remembering the feeling of hers.

  “Let me see the messages,” Harmon said, breaking the silence. Lake handed her the file and flipped it open to the first one. He then pointed out the second and third ones to 1-24.

  “They must have been in dire straits to use the words ‘Genzai Bakudan’ openly in the second message,” Harmon noted. “That was a mistake.”

  “Any idea what Cyclone or Forest are the code words for?” Lake asked.

  “Not off the top of my head,” Harmon replied. “The U.S. Navy in World War II broke the Japanese encryption code early on. But code words for specific locations such as these are different.”

  “In late May 1942, U.S. Navy analysts were intercepting and decrypting quite a bit of traffic that indicated that the Japanese were preparing a major operation. They could decrypt everything, including the code word of the intended target: XXXX. The problem was, like us, they didn’t know where XXXX was. They suspected it might be Midway Island, but the Japanese plan was so complex with so many different feints and maneuvers, it was hard to tell.”

  “So the code breakers devised a simple plan. They had the American forces on Midway send a radio message in the clear that they knew the Japanese would intercept. The message seemed quite innocent, simply stating that the water desalinator on Midway had broken and certain repair parts were needed.”

  “A couple of days later, they intercepted a Japanese message to the fleet at sea. When it was decoded, it said that XXXX’s water desalinator had broken. Thus the U.S. Navy knew that the main Japanese thrust was aimed at Midway.”

  “Pretty ingenious,” Lake said. “The only problem is that we’re fifty years too late to be sending any messages using these code words.” He looked at the map of the Pacific on the wall behind her desk. “Do you have any idea what would be a priority target for a Japanese atomic bomb that late in the war?”

  “For an atomic weapon delivered by submarine?” Harmon mused out loud. “My first guess would be the Allied fleet. By the time of those messages Okinawa had been taken and the home islands were under constant air attack. The Japanese were waiting for the final amphibious assault. Their number one threat was the Allied invasion fleet.”

  “And where was that in August 1945?” Lake asked.

  Harmon stood and stabbed her finger at the map. “Here. The Ulithi anchorage.”

  Lake had expected an ans
wer such as Pearl Harbor or Manila. “I’ve never heard of Ulithi.”

  “Most people haven’t,” Harmon said. “It’s in the Caroline Islands, centrally located between the two thrusts the U.S. was making toward Japan; from the sea, island hopping, and MacArthur’s through the Philippines.”

  “Actually there’s not much land at Ulithi, which is why I think it would be a perfect target for a submarine-launched atomic attack. Ulithi is basically a series of atolls surrounding a deep-water anchorage. The Navy desperately needed such an anchorage in this part of the Pacific from which to stage their forces. They learned a bitter lesson in December 1944 when a typhoon hit Task Force 38, sinking three destroyers and damaging numerous other ships. That’s the typhoon that the Caine Mutiny was based upon. I’d say there’s a possibility that the Cyclone code name might reflect the fact that TF 38 sheltered at Ulithi right after the typhoon.”

  Lake frowned. “I don’t think it would be that easy. Code names are usually decided upon by some staff wienie sitting behind a desk and aren’t supposed to have any relationship to whatever it is they are the code name for. Usually there’s just a list of words and the staff officer is just supposed to use the next one on the list.”

  “Sounds like you know something about this,” Harmon probed.

  “So what was at Ulithi in August 1945?” Lake asked, ignoring her comment.

  “In August 1945 most of the invasion fleet was gathered there in the anchorage preparing and refitting for the assault on Japan. Several carrier task forces were conducting operations against the mainland, but the troop transports, supply ships, and quite a number of combatant ships would have been there. Destroying the ships at Ulithi and making the anchorage unusable due to radioactivity would have severely set back the American invasion timetable for probably a year. Since the invasion was planned for ‘46, that means it would have to be put off to ‘47.”

  “It’s hard to say whether the American public would have stood for two more years of war,” Harmon added. “There was a great outcry over troops being shipped from Europe to the Pacific theater. If the Japanese could have destroyed the fleet at Ulithi, they might have been able to sue for peace.”

  Lake looked at the map. It made tactical sense. The Ulithi anchorage wasn’t that far from the Sea of Japan. “How would they do it, though?” Lake wondered. “Would they sneak in at night and try to offload the bomb?”

  Harmon shook her head. “I think that whoever armed the bomb would still be with it when it was supposed to go off. I think they would put it on a midget sub that they would launch to conduct a kamikaze attack.”

  “So we’re back to the original question,” Lake said. “Where’s the bomb now?”

  “We have to find out what happened to 1-24,” Harmon said. “And there’s something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said that I think Ulithi atoll would be the primary target for the Japanese bomb if they wanted to stop the Allied fleet. But the second message diverts the 1-24 from the primary target to the secondary one, Forest.” She was looking at the map. “So where’s Forest?”

  “That’s your province,” Lake said. “Let’s see if we can’t track down the fate of 1-24 and then maybe we can get a line on Cyclone and Forest.”

  “To the basement,” Harmon said.

  “To the basement,” Lake echoed.

  *****

  Nishin wasn’t worried about Cyclone or Forest or 1-24. That was Nakanga’s province. Nishin’s orders were to find out who the American was and who he worked for. He wasn’t glad he hadn’t killed Okomo as he headed toward the Japan Center, but he did realize that he had let emotion almost cause him to commit actions that now would have been detrimental to the success of the mission.

  He still needed the Yakuza, much as he didn’t want to admit it. The same guard was waiting in the restaurant foyer and without a word he led Nishin up to the enclosed roof after searching him.

  Okomo did not look like he had spent the night at sea and fought a pitched battle with North Korean commandos. He was seated at the head of his table, underlings lining the table on either side. “You would be dead right now if your friend Nakanga was not so efficient. The money is in my account. What do you want? Our business is done.”

  “I need information.”

  Okomo just stared at him. There were glares from the others around the table.

  “Oyabun,” Nishin reluctantly added.

  Okomo was still silent.

  “The North Koreans got their guns from an American. He met them at Fort Point to make the exchange, but they did not pay him. They tried to kill him, but he escaped. I need to find out about this American, Oyabun.” Nishin didn’t add the information that the American had gone down in the Am Nok Sung. That would pique the Yakuza’s interest too much. “We will pay.”

  “Of course you will pay,” Okomo said.

  Nishin stared into the flat black eyes of the old man. He tensed his stomach muscles, feeling the reassuring presence of the ice scraper poking into the flesh. The old man was dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than Nakanga knew.

  “I will inform you when I find something out.” Okomo waved a hand dismissing him. Once Nishin was gone, Okomo slowly walked back to the rear elevator to make his report.

  *****

  It was hot down in the basement of Wellman Hall. Lake’s shirt was soaked with sweat as he hauled boxes to the old wood desk that Harmon was seated at. She was scanning documents from January 1945 on, searching for any other reference to the code words Cyclone or Forest. Since Lake couldn’t read the Japanese text, he was reduced to being the errand boy. He didn’t mind. It gave his mind a chance to relax and unwind from the stress of the past several days. And he could also watch her without her knowing. He found himself mesmerized by the way the scant lighting reflected off her face and glowed through her hair. Her eyes flickered back and forth over the paper, then she glanced up, catching him watching and smiled, and he looked away. She returned to reading.

  Lake was also glad to be in the basement because it meant his cellular phone wouldn’t ring. He had now been out of touch with Feliks and the Ranch well past when he should have checked in.

  As he deposited another box on the desk, Harmon looked up. “What happened to your neck?”

  Lake was surprised at her directness. People rarely asked, not so much because of politeness, but because Lake tried to always project an image that discouraged people from asking him questions.

  “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “I can listen and read at the same time. You have nothing else to do,” she added.

  Lake sat down on a metal folding chair on the other side of the desk. “I’ll make it a short story. It happened a while back. Do you remember when that plane with all those troops coming from the peacekeeping mission in the Sinai crashed in Gander and they were all killed?”

  Harmon nodded. “Yes. The official cause, if I remember rightly, was ice on the wings.”

  “Yeah, that was the official story, but there were some who thought it was a bomb that destroyed the plane. And someone in our government thought they knew who might have planted that bomb. And someone in the chain of command felt that action in retaliation ought to be taken.”

  “Revenge?” Harmon asked, shutting one file and opening another.

  “No, not really. More along the lines of keeping the scales even. You hurt me, I hurt you. With the logical extension that the other guy then will think twice before hurting you again. So I was on the team that was picked to do the hurting back.”

  “Were you with the same organization that you’re with now?” Harmon asked.

  “No. Back then I was in the SEALs. Naval Special Warfare Unit Two, stationed in Coronado, California. They selected a squad from my platoon. Six men. I was the leader. We trained with some Agency guy who then picked two of us: me and my chief NCO, Rick Masters. The CIA man then briefed us. Our mission was to infiltrate into a certain country, which I will lea
ve unnamed—and kill the man who had supposedly been the mastermind behind the bomb plot.”

  Harmon arched her eyebrows. “Did they have any proof?”

  “They didn’t show us any,” Lake said dryly.

  “So the government...” Harmon’s voice trailed off.

  “Yes,” Lake said, “the U.S. government really does shit like that. How do you think we’ve managed to keep terrorism from our shores for so long? You don’t scare the bad guys by being nice. You scare them by being meaner than they are.”

  “So did you succeed in being mean?” Harmon asked. She had stopped reading. All her attention was on Lake.

  “Yes.”

  “And the scar?”

  Lake had been debriefed about the mission, but he had never told anyone outside of official channels about it. He wasn’t sure why he had even answered her question about the scar. This entire mission seemed out-of-sorts. Too many pieces that didn’t seem to fit other than the fact that Lake had stumbled across them. He wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. The events of the last several days he could handle piecemeal as they came up, but the cumulative effect was overwhelming. Being here in this dark archive basement seemed like a refuge from all that. Especially with Peggy Harmon sitting across from him.

  He knew there was no evidence to prove what he was saying. It was just like everything else he had told her. And he felt a need to talk, to let out the darkness that had been in him for so many years.

  “Rick and I infiltrated the target country after locking out of a submarine,” he said.