Fortunes of War

by Stephen Coonts

  It would be dicey — the message would have to appear to someone who knew Ju’s style to be indubitably his, yet the tone had to be wrong — not clearly wrong, just subtly wrong, enough to create a shadow of doubt about the truth of the facts related in the mind of a knowledgeable reader. The tone would be the lie. God knows, Toshihiko Ayukawa was a knowledgeable reader!

  Okada lit another cigarette. He flexed his fingers. His colleagues were still glued to the television in the common area. He took a last drag, put the cigarette in an ashtray to smolder, and began to type quickly. The thought shot through his head that Ayukawa might ask another cryptographer to decode the original of this message again. True, he might, if he thought Okada had done a sloppy job. And if he did that, Okada would be in more trouble than he could handle. He would just have to rely on his reputation, that’s all. He was the best. The boss damn well knew it. Oh well, every man’s fate was in the hands of the gods. They would write a man’s life as they chose. I — lis fingers flew over the keyboard.

  When he finished the message, he read it over carefully. He had it the way he wanted it. He put the fake message into the official envelope and signed the routing slip in the box provided for the cryptographer. The people outside were still watching television, milling around, talking. No one seemed to be looking his way. Okada held the copy of the real message under his desk and folded it carefully. He then slipped the small square of paper into a sock. He took the envelope in his hand, weighing it one last time. When he walked out of this office with this envelope in his hand, he was irrevocably committed. He swayed slightly as the enormity of what he had done pressed down upon him. He had to struggle to draw a breath. Ayukawa knew Ju’s work. This fake message might stand out like a police emergency light on a dark night. If so, Masataka Okada was doomed. His eye fell upon the old photo of his family that stood on the back of his desk. It was perched precariously there, almost ready to fall on the floor, shoved out of the way when he made room for the usual books and files and reports that seemed to grow like mushrooms on his desk. That picture must be at least ten years old. His daughter was grown now, with a baby of her own. His son was in graduate school. What would they look like with their skin black and smoking and hanging in putrid ribbons from their backs? From their faces?

  Masataka Okada took a firm grip on the envelope and walked out of his office.

  At six that evening, Okada’s superior officer, Toshihiko Ayukawa, got around to opening the classified security envelope containing the decoded message from Agent Ju. He’d had a feeling when this message first came in that it might be very important, but he had spent the afternoon in meetings and was just now getting to the red-hot matters awaiting his attention in his office. It was a wonder his desk hadn’t melted, with a belligerent China, civil unrest in Siberia, and riots in the streets of Hong Kong. Yet the assassination of the emperor and the coming state funeral took precedence over everything. “No,” he had told the agency director, “we have no indication whatever that any Asian power had anything to do with the emperor’s murder.”

  As Ayukawa read the message, he frowned. It sounded like Ju, cited the proper codes, yet … He read it through again slowly, his mind racing. He looked at the envelope for the signature of the cryptographer. Okada. Then he called his confidential assistant, Sushi Maezumi. He held up the envelope where Sushi could see it. “Why did you give this to Okada?”

  The assistant looked at the signature, then his face fell. “I apologize, sir. I forgot.”

  “I had another copy of this message for decoding.” Ayukawa consulted his ledger. He believed in keeping his operation strictly compartmentalized. It was unfortunate that the aide had to know that he occasionally handed out duplicates of the messages to be decoded and translated, but unless he had the time to do everything himself and he didn’t — he had to delegate. The use of duplicates allowed him to check on the competency of his staff. And their loyalty. And if the message was important, he would have two versions to compare, for they were never exactly the same. “Number three four oh nine,” Ayukawa said. “Where is it?”

  “Here, sir.” Sushi removed the envelope from the bottom of the pile. Ayukawa ripped it open and scanned the message. He didn’t even bother to compare this with Okada’s short story. “You disobeyed my order. I told you not to give any sensitive item to Okada without my express approval.”

  “I forgot, sir.”

  The avoidance of direct confrontation was one of the pillars on which Japanese society rested. Ayukawa had little use for that social more. “That’s no excuse,” he said bluntly to his aide, who blanched. “My instructions must be obeyed to the letter. Always. I am the officer responsible, not you. And you know that we have a mole in this agency.

  … But enough — we’ll discuss it later. Go see if Okada is still in the building. Now, quickly.”

  Speechless after this verbal hiding, Sushi Maezumi shot from the office as if he had been scalded.

  In the Shinjuku district neon lights tinted the skins of visitors red, green, blue, orange, and yellow, all in succession, as they moved from one garishly lit storefront to the next. Beyond the light was the night, but here there was life. Here there was sex.

  This was Tokyo’s French Quarter, only more so, a concentration of adult bookstores, peep shows, porno palaces, and nightclubs, with here and there a whorehouse for the terminally conventional. The whore-houses ranged from bordellos specializing in cheap quickies to geisha houses where the evening’s entertainment might cost thousands of dollars.

  The crowds were an inherent part of the district’s attraction. A visitor could blend into the mass of humanity and become an anonymous voyeur, savoring sexual pleasures denied by social convention, which is the very essence of pornography.

  Masataka Okada moved easily through the swarms of people. He enjoyed the sexual tension, a release from the extraordinary, heart-attack stress he had experienced that day, as he did every day. The flashing lights and weird colors, highlighted on the men’s white shirts, seemed to draw him and everyone else into the fantasy world of pleasure.

  Okada bought two square cakes of fried shark meat from a sidewalk vendor. The heat of the evening and closeness of the crowd made the smell of the cooking fat and fish particularly pungent.

  He walked on, adrift in this sea of people. The lights and heat and smells engulfed him.

  Somewhere on this planet there might be an occupation more stressful than that of a spy, but it would be difficult to imagine what it would be. A spy played a deadly game, was always onstage, spent every waking moment waiting for the ax to fall. In the beginning it had been easier for Masataka Okada, but now, as the full implications of his choices became increasingly clear, just getting through each day became more and more difficult. Every gesture, every word, every unspoken nuance had to be examined for a sinister meaning. Any slip would be fatal, so every choice came laden with stress.

  The truth of the matter was that Masataka Okada was burning out. He was nearing the end of his string.

  As he strolled and watched the crowd this evening, his thoughts turned to World War II. Every Japanese had to come to grips with World War II in some personal way. Every living person had lost family members in that holocaust — grandfathers, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, mothers, aunts, grandmothers — all gone, like smoke, as if they had never been. Yet they had been; they had lived, and they had been cut down.

  About 2.1 million Japanese had perished in that war, over 6 million Chinese and, however the apologists dressed it up, the fact remained that the war in the Pacific had begun with Japan’s full-scale assault on China in 1937. Once blood had been drawn, Japan’s doom became inevitable: the rape of Nanking, Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march, the firebombing of Japanese cities, Okinawa, the obliteration of Hiro-shima and Nagasaki — it was a litany of human suffering as horrific as any event the species had yet endured.

  Okada had long ago made up his mind who was responsible for that suicidal course o
f events: Japan’s government, and its people, for governments do not act in a vacuum. When you thought about it dispassionately, you had to question the sanity of the persons responsible. A crowded island nation about the size of California willingly had sought total war with the most powerful nation on earth, one with twice its population and ten times its industrial capacity.

  And so, in a tragedy written in blood, an entire generation of young men had been sacrificed on the altar of war; the treasure of the nation — accumulated through the centuries — had been squandered, every family ripped asunder, the homeland devastated, laid waste.

  All that was history, the dead past. As long ago and far away as the Mejii restoration, as the first shogun…, and yet it wasn’t. The war had scarred them all.

  An hour’s strolling back and forth through the neighborhood brought Okada to a small peep parlor. With a long last look in a window at the reflections of the people behind him, he paid his admission and went inside.

  The foyer was dimly lit. Sound came from hidden speakers: Japanese music, adenoidal wailing above a twanging string instrument — just noise.

  From the foyer, one entered a long hallway, each side of which was lined with doors. Small red bulbs in the ceiling illuminated the very air, which was almost an impenetrable solid: swirling cigarette smoke, the smell of perspiration, and something sickeningly sweet — semen.

  The walls seemed to close in; it was almost impossible to breathe. An attendant was in the hall, a small man in a white shirt with no collar. His teeth were so misshapen that his lips were twisted into a permanent sneer. A smoldering cigarette hung from one corner of his mouth. He looked at Okada with dead eyes and lifted his fingers, signaling numbers. Thirty-two. Okada looked for that number on a door. It was beyond the attendant. He turned sideways in the narrow hallway to get by the attendant. As he did so, the man behind him opened a door. For a few seconds, Okada and the attendant were isolated in a tiny space in the hallway, isolated from all other human eyes. In that brief moment, Okada pressed the message into the attendant’s hand. He found booth 32, opened the door, and entered.

  There were ten of them waiting for him to come home, but Masa-taka Okada didn’t know that. They were arranged in two circles, the first of which covered the possible approach routes to the apartment building, and the second of which covered the entrances. Two men were in the apartment with his wife, waiting. The man in the subway station saw him first, waited until he was out of sight, then reported the contact on his handheld radio. Okada was nervous, wary. The sensations of Shinjuku had been wasted upon him tonight. He hadn’t been able to get the message from Ju off his mind, couldn’t stop thinking about the murder of the emperor, couldn’t stop thinking about his mother’s scarred back. Despite being keyed up and alert, he didn’t see the man in the subway. A block later, he did spot the man watching the side entrance to the building where he lived. This man was in a parked car, and he made the mistake of looking around. When he saw Okada, he looked away, but too late. Masataka Okada kept walking toward the entrance as his mind raced. They had come. Finally. They were here for him!

  His wife … she was upstairs. Fortunately, she knew absolutely nothing about his spying, not even that he did it. So there was nothing she could tell them. It shouldn’t have to end like this. Really, it shouldn’t. He had done his best. He didn’t want future generations of Japanese to go through what his parents had endured, and he had had the courage to act on his convictions. Now it was time to pay the piper.

  Well, the Americans had the message from Ju, as well as all the others, all the copies of documents that he had made and passed on detailing the secret arms contracts and the buildup of the military that had been going on for the last seven years. They knew, and Abe didn’t know they knew. Abe would find out, if these men managed to arrest him. They would get the truth from him one way or the other. Okada had no illusions on that score. They would use any means necessary to make him talk; there was just too much at stake. The dark doorway of the building loomed in front of him. If he walked through that door, they had him. Some of them might be inside just now, waiting to grab him, throw him to the floor, and slap handcuffs on him. Even if they let him go up to the apartment, they would come for him there. They would never let him leave the building. These thoughts zipped through his head in the time it took for him to take just one step toward the doorway. He would not go in. He turned right, down the sidewalk, and began to walk briskly. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the man in the car looking his way and holding a radio mike in front of his mouth. Even though he knew he shouldn’t, Masataka Okada began to run. He had had a good life, and he didn’t want to give it up. Those fools who killed the emperor, committing hara-kari, voluntarily ended the only existence they would ever have. Ah, was life so worthless that a man should throw it away, as if it didn’t matter?

  He darted into the street and managed to avoid an oncoming bus. He made it to the sidewalk on the other side and swerved into an alley. Down the alley a ways was a brick wall, which Okada climbed over with much huffing and puffing, severely skinning his ankle. He found himself inside a cemetery. The headstones and little temples looked weird in the reflected half-light of the city, sinister. This was Japan’s future — he saw it in a horrible revelation: a nation of tombstones and funeral temples, ashes in urns, a nation of the dead. Sobbing, Okada threaded his way through all this masonry and crawled across the wall on the other side. His ankle hurt like fire, but the collapse of his world and his vision of the future hurt worse. His wife…, what would she think? Oh, how he had abandoned her, poor, loyal woman. He was now in another alley, this one lined with little wooden houses, relics of old Japan. He thought about stealing a bicycle but couldn’t bring himself to do it. At the end of the alley was a street. Although he was severely winded already, he managed to work himself into a trot. As he rounded the corner, he met a man running the other way. Fortune favored Okada — he reacted first and got his hands up, bowling the other man over as he went by. He didn’t look back, just ran. Alas, his gait was a hell-bent stagger, his lungs tearing at him as he gasped futilely, unable to get enough oxygen. Ahead was a subway station. If he could catch a train, he could get off anywhere, could lose himself in Tokyo, perhaps even make his way to the American embassy. Those Americans, they said that someday this might happen. He had refused to believe, even when he knew they spoke the truth. He was close to passing out from the exertion, almost unable to think. He smoked several packs of cigarettes a day, had done so for years, and he never exercised. Okada could hear footsteps pounding the pavement behind him. There — the stairs into the subway! He ran down them, grabbed the turnstile, and leapt over. More stairs. He took them two at a time. He could hear the running feet behind him, closer and closer, but he used the last of his energy, forcing himself to run even though he could scarcely breathe and was having difficulty seeing. Spots swam before his eyes. A train was coming. If they catch me … The train was still moving at a pretty good clip when Masataka Okada did a swan dive off the platform, right in front of it.

  4

  He could see it above him, at least two miles up, a flashing silver shape in the vast, deep blue. Jiro Kimura used the handhold on the canopy bow to hold himself upright against the G forces. He grunted, kept his muscles tense so that he would not pass out, fought to keep his eyes on that flashing silver plane so far above. If he lost sight of that plane, it might take several seconds to reacquire it, seconds he could ill afford to lose. The other pilot was undoubtedly looking down at him, watching him twist and turn, waiting for an opening when he could come swooping down with his gun blazing — like an angel of doom. Or the bloody Red Baron. To kill. Jiro Kimura knew all of that because he knew the other pilot. His name was Sasai. He was just twenty-four, rarely smiled, and never made the same mistake twice. This was only Sasai’s third one-on-one flight, but he was learning quickly. just now, Kimura wanted to make Sasai think that he had an opening when he really didn’t. Kimura rocked h
is wings violently from side to side, first one way and then the other. He was also feeding in forward stick, unloading the plane and accelerating, but Sasai couldn’t see that from two miles above. All he could see were the wings rocking, as if Kimura had momentarily lost sight and was futilely trying to find his opponent. Sasai turned to arc in behind Kimura and put his nose down, committing himself. Kimura waited for several seconds, maybe our, then lit the afterburner and pulled his nose up. The G felt good, solid, as the horizon fell away. Jiro Kimura loved to fly, and this morning he acknowledged that fact to himself, again, for the thousandth time. To fly a state-of-the-art fighter plane in an endless blue sky, to have someone to yank and bank withand try to outwit, then to go home and think about how it had been while planning to do it again tomorrow — what had life to offer that could possibly be sweeter?

  When he was vertical, Kimura spun around his longitudinal axis until his wings were perpendicular to Sasai’s flight path; then he pulled his nose over to lead Sasai, who was now frantically trying to evade the trap. Because he was slower, Kimura could turn more quickly than the descending plane, could bring his gun to bear first.