of passengers at a time, no matter what the weather. ASAM shares jumped from ten dollars to $86.50 within a month of being issued. At a hundred dollars, fourteen percent of the shareholders sold, but Susan Basehart held on, sure it would very soon climb to over a hundred dollars.
As the Tokyo-Niigata express raced through the countryside at over a hundred miles per hour, Tazuko Komura took care not to look in the foreground that was receding in a dizzying green blur of fields and supporting trestles of the fast-line track. Instead she looked beyond at the steadier scene of long, variegated rectangular sheets of newly dyed kimono linen stretched out on the green fields to dry. They looked like strips of exotic flags. The train was now on the flats going in excess of 100 mph. She pressed the button.
The flash of the explosion could be seen for miles, the sound of it now rolling thunderously across the countryside, like thunder, the forward section of the train split in half as if struck by some enormous cleaver, bodies incinerated, the rear sections of the bullet train telescoping into one another in excess of 100 mph, then shooting off the elevated rail ten meters above a field into mangled tubular heaps of smoking metal and upholstery that were giving off columns of toxic smoke. There were no survivors, body parts strewn across the field and among the trees of a small wood outside Sanjo.
NHK, Japan’s national network, got to the story first, then CNN. Within forty-five minutes of the crash Susan Basehart’s stock in ASAM industries tumbled. She lost over $350,000 and was effectively wiped out.
Subsequent media investigations pointed out that sabotage had almost certainly been the cause of the catastrophe in which all 372 passengers and crew were killed, and that bullet-train railway technology was markedly different from that used in maglev vehicles. But these reports had little or no effect on the stock markets of the world — confidence in supertrains had crashed with the Tokyo-Niigata express. As Susan Basehart’s health grew worse, exacerbated by the shock of her near financial rain, she was told that due to medical bills, only some of which were covered by her health plan, she would spend her last days in a public ward at Bellevue.
The effect of the bullet train disaster in Japan was to produce a chilling recognition among the Japanese public, and in particular in the Japanese Defense Force, of just how vulnerable rapid transit movement of supplies and people was to terrorism. In the interrogation room of Tokyo’s JDF offices, the North Korean agent Jae Chong was shown a video of the train wreck and given a single sheet of paper by one of the JDF agents, who told him that if he didn’t start writing down contact names and numbers, he would be beaten again.
“It’s no good protecting the bastard that blew it up,” the JDF agent told Jae Chong, acting on a hunch that because of stringent security on the bullet trains, and with no package being allowed to stand unattended, it had probably been a suicide bomber.
Jae Chong sat there immobile, only the muscles in his face and the blinking of his eyes giving any indication of his nervousness. He slowly took up the ballpoint pen and then just as slowly put it down.
“Bastard!” the JDF agent yelled, and punched him in the temple, knocking him off the stool. A call came through for the JDF agent from CIA agent Henry Wray.
“What’s the story?” Wray asked. He sounded drunk.
“Nothing yet.”
“I just saw the Shinkansen wreck on the TV.”
The JDF agent waited — was he supposed to say something?
“Well,” Wray said, “has our songbird started to sing?”
“No.”
“I’ll come down.”
“I will send a car for you,” the JDF man said.
“No — I’ll be all right. Grab the
“All right,” Wray said. “You’re paying for it.”
Wray took the Beretta off the top of the TV. Now that so many people had been killed on the bullet train, he felt justified in having told the JDF to smack the North Korean around. “Hell!” he said, talking to himself in the tiny hallway’s mirror and grabbing his hat from the rack on the second tray. “Should’ve beaten the prick earlier — fuck the cardboard box!” It only gave a suspect more time to think — to weasel their way out of it. Well, Henry Wray was going to put the 9mm’s barrel right against the son of a bitch’s head, and he’d better start talking.
“Over three hundred people,” Wray said, hands in his pockets. “Almost four hundred — men, women, and kids — were killed on that Shinkansen, you little prick — so you’d better start writing, Chong. Understand?”
The JDF agent could see that Wray had the Beretta in his shoulder holster so that Chong would get the message.
“Understand?” Wray repeated.
“Good.”
Chong bent over the small table in front of the stool. His shoulders slumped, then with a sigh of defeat he began writing down a phone number. “I don’t know the name,” he said. “I just call the number — somebody answers and I leave a message.”
“If you don’t have a name,” Wray said, “what happens if you misdial — get a wrong number?” The JDF agent was impressed. For someone half hungover, the CIA man was on the ball.
“Whoever answers,” Chong said, using his sleeve to wipe off a trickle of blood running down his chin, “says the number. Then I leave my message.”
“Huh!” Wray grunted, leaning forward to pick up the paper. Chong’s left hand hit him in the face, Chong’s right hand pulling out the Beretta. He fired once before it cleared the holster, the shot hitting Wray’s heart at point-blank range, the second shot lodging in the JDF agent’s stomach — again at point-blank range — throwing the agent back against the wall, streaking it with blood. The Japanese’s legs buckling, he slid down to the floor, blood spurting out from the gut wound. The interrogation door swung open and Chong fired again, dropping another JDF agent, others scattering in all directions.
Chong ran out firing two shots at random, clerks and other agents diving for cover behind desks as Chong reached the elevator. It wasn’t open. Immediately he ran for the stairwell, where, taking a terrorized woman hostage, pressing the gun’s barrel against her neck, he made his way out into the street. It was now dark and raining, the Ginza strip’s neons coming to life as he walked down the street. Suddenly releasing her, he made a dash down an alley and disappeared into the nighttime crowds of shoppers, the wail of police and ambulance klaxons filling the air.
Chong’s escape and the three men he left dead in the JDF building provided a field day for the press and a nightmare scenario for those officials responsible for the Japanese end of the logistical supply trains that were to provide the American Second Army in Vietnam with vitally needed supplies. The JDF now knew that as a hunted man, Jae Chong had nothing to lose. There was no doubt that he would be recaptured, but the question was where he and/or other North Korean agents would strike next.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
North of Hanoi along the road to Lang Son, General “George C. Scott” Freeman, to his acute embarrassment, found it necessary to halt his advance recon cloverleaf patrol because of lack of information about where General Vinh’s forces were.
To make matters worse, the Chinese Fourth Division had penetrated the Vietnamese Army positions along the fifteen-mile Lang Son-Loc Binh front, pushing Vinh’s regulars back along the Lang Son-Ban Re railway, creating the possibility of widespread confusion between the EMREF’s advancing reconnaissance patrol and the retreating Vietnamese.
For now, Freeman and Vinh decided to have the EMREF recon force withdraw sixty miles south to Phu Lang Thuong along the hundred mile Lang Son-Hanoi road so as to avoid any further blue on blue incidents. One of the
