The dojo, Fitzduane judged, as he shuffled across the floor, legs hobbled between two yakuza guards, was about the size of a Western school gymnasium.
The decor was understated simplicity, but the room was quite magnificently finished and appointed. Japanese craftsmanship at its best was truly something to see. The floor, made of planks of some richly hued hardwood, was seamless, ever plank impeccably aligned. The roof was arched and paneled with the same wood. The walls were plastered and racked with an extraordinary selection of medieval pikes, swords and fighting knives from all over the world. Glancing across, Fitzduane noticed everything from Spanish rapiers to Malayan fighting knives.
Firearms were conspicuous by their absence. Kei Namaka's orientation was more toward fantasy than fact, though that did not make him any less dangerous.
The small procession made its way through two sets of double doors, donning shoes in the lobby in the middle. As they passed through the second set of doors, which were double-glazed and of heavy industrial quality, the noise level rose and Fitzduane could see the highly specialized equipment of a modern steel plant spread out ahead of them.
So the dojo was actually in the plant. Now he was beginning to understand things better. The NamakaTower was the symbol of the brothers' joint success. The steel plant was Kei's personal baby. Costing billions, it was a grown-up box of toys.
They were standing on a railed catwalk of perforated metal. The cat-walk, in turn, led to metal stairs which would bring them to the factory floor, but instead of continuing, Kei Namaka held up his hand to indicate they should halt and turned to Fitzduane.
'Steel, Fitzduane- san,' he said, 'is my passion and joy. It is at the same time so elemental and yet so extraordinarily sophisticated. It is a manifestation of man's superiority and the supreme link between man and nature. It is the very stuff of legend. It is the raw material of the sword, the very symbol of Japan. It is strong, beautiful, infinitely malleable, supremely versatile, and technologically elegant. It is the principal material of war and one of the major blocks of peace. Ships, aircraft, and all wheeled communication depends on it. Nations have been built with it. We cut our very food with it.' He paused. 'And the creation of steel products on the scale we operate at here is a process of unsurpassed excitement. It is physically exciting – indeed, sexually arousing in its power and drama and beauty.'
After he had finished speaking, Kei Namaka stared at Fitzduane with an extraordinary intensity, as if he were trying to communicate his enthusiasm for steel telepathically.
The scene was quite bizarre. Kei, in the foreground in full samurai armor including an ornate horned helmet, looking like something out of the Middle Ages, and over his shoulder the vast machines, ovens. And other devices symbolic of advanced late-twentieth-century metals technology. Yet curiously, Kei did not really look out of place. The relationship of steel and the warrior was ever valid.
Steel, for so much of history, was indeed at the cutting edge of power.
Fitzduane held up his hands as far as the handcuffs and the restraining chain permitted. 'I am bound by steel, Namaka- san,' he said quietly. 'It tempers my enthusiasm.'
Kei's face flushed with rage, and for a moment it looked as if he was going to strike Fitzduane. Then he started to laugh. '‘Tempers my enthusiasm’ indeed, Fitzduane- san. A clever pun. You have a good sense of humor for a gaijin.'
He gave an order, and one of the yakuza placed safety glasses on Fitzduane. The incongruity of following safety regulations while escorting their prisoner around in chains caused him to give a wry smile.
'We Japanese,' said Kei, 'achieved some of our earlier postwar successes with steel. While the West was working with old technology – too greedy to invest and lacking in vision – we built new modern steel plants and produced cheaper, higher-quality steel faster. This, in turn, provided the raw material at the right price for car production and for shipbuilding. It was the beginning of our economic recovery. Later, of course, we developed into electronics and other high-added-value products, but steel was our initial breakthrough.'
Fitzduane nodded. The Japanese achievement was undeniable, but it had not occurred in a vacuum. Without U.S. military protection, Japan had stood a good chance of being grabbed by Soviet Russia at the end of the Second World War. Subsequently, Japan had benefitted enormously from U.S. expenditure in Japan and virtually unrestricted access to U.S. markets. Still, this was no time to get involved in a geopolitical debate.
'But Namaka Special Steels has little to do with cars and ships, I think,' shouted Fitzduane.
The noise had increased as they had approached the center of operations. The primary sound was like a wave, loud and continuous. He had been around Vaybon's steel facilities in Switzerland and remembered that it came from burning flames of gas. It was the noise of the tempering ovens generating the awesome temperatures that steelmaking required.
There was something frightening about the sound, as if it represented a ferocity beyond the ability of mere humans to resist. In fact, almost all the machinery he could see was vastly larger than human scale. It looked like a workshop for giants. Humans might have conceived it, but now their very creation had surpassed them and seemed to have a life of their own.
In the center of the floor was an immense vertical construction of tubes and black metal and cylinders that looked like a cross between some insane scientist's vision of the ultimate destructive robot and a rocket complete with strapped-on boosters on a launching pad.
It was roughly the size of a six-story building, and Fitzduane felt dwarfed by it. It emphasized the scale of the facility they were in. The huge machine was in turn comfortably accommodated by its surroundings. The roof must be well over a hundred feet up. He looked, but his gaze was lost in darkness.
'Project Tsunami,' shouted Kei into Fitzduane's ear. 'This is what makes it all possible.'
'What is Project Tsunami,' Namaka- san?' said Fitzduane. 'I haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about.'
'Hah!' said Kei. 'You know exactly what I am talking about, gaijin, and it is why we could not let you live, even if we did not have a past obligation to kill you.'
The thought occurred briefly to Fitzduane that, in the interests of self-preservation, it might be a good idea not to get to know any more about Tsunami. Then he thought, What the hell! For one reason or another, Kei, quite obviously, had not intention of letting him live. He had not blown up three people just to have the pleasure of Fitzduane's company for a pleasant half hour or so.
'Indulge me, Namaka- san,' said Fitzduane. 'Let me put it as simply as I can. What the fuck is Project Tsunami?'
Namaka looked at him curiously. Perhaps the gaijin did not know. Perhaps he was not the threat he had appeared. That would be ironic. Well, it was too late to turn back now.
'Project Tsunami,' said Kei, speaking into Fitzduane's ear to counteract the noise, 'is the name we have given to our North Korean project. In defiance of the U.S. and, indeed, world embargoes, we are providing North Korea with the specialized plant and equipment necessary to manufacture nuclear weapons. It is an immensely profitable project and will restore the fortunes of Namaka Steel and indeed the keiretsu as a whole. And this machine – we call it Godzilla – is an important element. Godzilla allows us to forge the huge pressure chambers required for an essential part of the process. Few companies have the technology, and fewer still have the production plants of this scale. Look! They are just about to forge another chamber. You can see the whole process for yourself.'
Fitzduane looked across to where Kei was pointing. A giant crablike machine running on tracks had scuttled up and extended two metal arms and was manipulating an enormous glowing cylinder. A darker material seemed to surround it, and as Fitzduane watched, the cylinder was beaten by what seemed to be a giant flail of chains.
'That is the ingot for one chamber,' said Kei. 'It weighs forty-two tons and it has just been heated to forging temperature by one of the ovens. The ingot oxidizes on the surface, so the impure surface layer – it is called scale – must be removed or it will hinder forging. Scale is peeled away partly by the chains and then by the initial forging.'
For all the talk of high technology, beating a white-hot lump of metal with chains seemed to Fitzduane to be a crude process, but Kei certainly got some fun out of it. His face was glowing with enthusiasm and the ambient heat. Under his samurai helmet with its ornamental horns, he looked like some demonic goblin king.
'The ingot is now going through a series of preliminary deformation processes,' said Kei. 'The next stage is that it will be given a predetermined diameter by one of the smaller processes.'
