just an admission that they had all thought it would be residential.
Wray looked about him up at the forest of apartment blocks and exhaled heavily. “Where?” he asked of no one in particular. If they couldn’t find the person who answered — and it didn’t look as if they would — then they were, as Wray had said, back to square one.
The most senior of the Japanese agents spoke to the others, and just in case Wray’s Japanese was a little rusty, he explained in English, “We’ll dust the phone booth for prints. You never know.”
Henry Wray nodded, his tone more one of resignation than expectation. “Might as well.”
Next morning, Tazuko made herself a picnic lunch of sushi, and also packed a small bottle of mineral water. Normally she preferred to eat from one of the side-street stalls in Tokyo, but this day she didn’t want to go into any shop, because afterward they would be looking for anyone who had been carrying a shoulder bag large enough to transport the explosive. It was highly unlikely they would find her, she thought, but it was best to avoid any contact with anyone. It was a bright, sunny day and Tazuko took this as a good omen. And from a purely practical point of view, it meant she could wear her sunglasses, which of course gave her more cover.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Here!” the people’s Liberation Army bosun ordered, pointing brusquely to the portside entrance to the Jianghu frigate. On the bridge Mellin saw an officer immaculately dressed in white uniform and dark blue-banded white cap, a captain’s gold insignia on his collar tabs and shoulder boards, the red star in the middle of his cap. He was a small man but carried a quiet authority about him.
“Why are you on this reef?” he asked Mellin.
Mellin was astounded by the question, his earlier moments of reverie when he knew he would be rescued now supplanted by a perplexed mood. Why are you on this reef? Surely a child could see he’d been cast upon the reef. What did the Chinese think — that he was just passing by on a ship and suddenly decided, Oh, I’ll go and sit on a reef? Anyway, who in hell were they? Did they think they owned the damn reef?
As he was to find out, that’s precisely what they did think— that they owned it and many more like it in the South China Sea among both the Spratly and Paracel islands, and it was not at all uncommon to have them station two PLA soldiers on a reef next to a lone four-to-six-foot-high marker claiming this or that particular reef was Chinese territory. If the published photographs of two hapless-looking PLA soldiers on duty atop a reef, unable to keep their feet dry, seemed humorous to others, they were deadly serious to the PLA. The two soldiers armed with AK-47s were ready to shoot anyone who tried to land.
“Where is the marker?” the officer asked.
Mellin looked from the officer to the bosun and back again. “What marker?”
“There was a marker on the island, proclaiming it to be the property of the People’s Republic of China.”
Mellin’s throat was so dry he found his tongue sticking to his palate, and his first attempt to answer was garbled. The Chinese officer, still looking disapprovingly at the American, said something to the bosun, who disappeared and reappeared with a worn enamel mug of water. Mellin nodded, gulped it down, handed the mug back to the bosun with a nod of thanks and told the officer, “I don’t know anything about a marker.”
“There was a marker there,” the officer said angrily.
“Look, I’m grateful for you picking me up, but I never saw any marker. Want to search me?”
“Do not silly man,” snapped the officer, unaware of his grammatical mistake. Mellin, however, knew better than to show even the slightest amusement. This officer was not one for joking, the security of the marker amid competing claims for oil and minerals obviously his responsibility. Now Mellin understood what the Chinese who had taken him off the rock had so assiduously been looking for. Where had the marker gone?
“There is no sign of it,” the officer said. “Did you use explosives?”
“Listen, Captain—”
“I am not the captain. I am second officer — Lieutenant Mung.”
“All right, Lieutenant Mung. Look, I don’t know anything about a marker. And if it’s explosions you want to talk about, I have a few questions of my own. First of all—”
“You speak too much in haste.”
Mellin slowed down. “I was on—” Mellin stopped. Whoever had attacked the
“This is Chinese territory,” Mung interrupted. “All the Spratlys are Chinese.”
“But it’s hundreds of miles beyond your two-hundred-mile limit,” Mellin said.
“Like your Hawaii,” Mung said. The bosun thought that this was very smart, and a smug smile took him captive.
“Hawaii,” Mellin began, “has been U.S. territory for more than—”
“So too with the Spratlys. Chinese were there long before anyone else.”
“I don’t believe that,” Mellin said simply.
Lieutenant Mung spoke rapidly to the bosun, who then told Mellin, “Come with me.”
A guard joined them as the bosun quickly led Mellin down below and forward to the paint locker and told him he would be given food shortly. Then the bosun slammed the door and left. Suddenly, Mellin was in utter darkness. He began to hyperventilate in sheer terror, his claustrophobia so intense that he thought he would go mad, his panic heightened by the overwhelming, cloying smell of paint, which caused his sinuses to all but close down, making it difficult for him to breathe. Within minutes he was drenched in perspiration, his clothes sticking to him like Saran Wrap, and all the while his anxiety heightened by the unknown. What were they going to do with him? The brusque way they had treated him, it was as if China and the U.S. were at war.
The fingerprints they got from the public phone in the Kita-Ku district were not helpful. The prints were smudged, and it was the forensic technician’s guess that whoever had held the phone in response to the call from the Asakusa Kannon Temple had probably worn gloves. Besides, it had taken them an hour to get to the booth — many people could have used it by then — and so forensics was at a loss as to why they had been asked to take prints at all.
The best they could do now, Wray thought, was to stake out the phone booth and run a security check on everyone who used it In lieu of this long, tedious surveillance, Wray and his Japanese colleagues were tempted to bring in Jae, but they held off for fear of making an arrest that would not stick. A crime had to happen before they could act on their suspicions that the Chongryun were up to no good. Meantime, there had been no letup in the coded radio messages from North Korea, and it was generally agreed among Western intelligence agencies that in Pyongyang the “great new leader,” Kim Jong Il, like his father, the “great leader” Kim Il Sung, was about to turn up the heat.
They were wrong. Pyongyang had already sent its instructions for her mission to Tazuko Komura via Jae weeks before. The communication from Jae had been the final transmit.
CHAPTER TWENTY
For most of the men with “George C. Scott,” Douglas Freeman, the first sighting of Vietnam from the lead Hercules, a line of deep green broken here and there by palm-shaded beaches, was not particularly memorable. Only Freeman and a few others were old enough to really remember the Vietnam War, let alone to have fought in it. For most it was one of many wars America had fought, and America’s defeat had not marked them as it had Freeman and others who could still recall Walter Cronkite entering their living rooms every evening to tell them the state of the war and, always, like a football score, the body count.
In any case, the predominant emotion in the plane was fear — fear of the enemy and fear of showing it. These were not conscripts, but well-trained professionals, some who had seen action in the Iraqi War and some in
