Bleeding, her face throbbing with pain, Yoko crept back to the women’s barracks and wept quietly in her bunk, determined not to raise a fuss, put Tayama in danger. The thought that Suzuki, a fellow Japanese-American, might have been one of the men seemed unthinkable until she recalled reports she’d heard of how in Korea and China some of the POWs captured by the Japanese Imperial Army had turned collaborationist, and had become more cruel toward their own kind than their Japanese captors.
Four days later she saw Suzuki enter the camp between two tall white guards and noticed, with satisfaction, that the naval intelligence officer’s former swaggering self-confidence had been replaced now with a stare of apprehension.
A few days later the rumor was that while Suzuki was still nominally a lieutenant in U.S. Naval Intelligence, he was being used not as an interrogator but merely as an interpreter and, as a further insult, in the women’s, rather than the men’s, barracks. He too was clearly under suspicion. She also saw Tayama for the first time since they had been herded into the Army truck. Not being married they, like all the other single men and women, had been segregated and couldn’t speak to each other. But Tayama didn’t have to be told what had happened to her. He could see the dark bruising on her face and arms, her swollen lips, and while he said nothing, the veins in his neck suddenly became taut, pulsating with rage at what he knew must have happened.
From that moment on, Tayama Omura’s one-time admiration for America and Americans froze and transformed itself into a hatred that would never leave him, a hatred increasingly rationalized by the way in which the innocent Nisei and Japanese immigrants in Hawaii would be treated for the duration of the war. Never mind the fact that later Nisei volunteers, many of them who, like Suzuki, had been either downgraded or dismissed outright from the National Guard and who were prevented from joining any of the armed services, eventually formed two segregated Nisei regiments and that one of these units, the 442nd, went into action in Europe, becoming the most decorated combat unit in the history of the United States. Or that one of the Nisei veterans, whose life was saved by a field blood transfusion from a member of a segregated black combat unit and who lost an arm during battle, was not only decorated but later became Hawaii’s first senator. For Tayama Omura all that mattered was that his beloved Yoko had been raped by an American.
Six weeks after the assault, Yoko realized her ill fortune had become compounded and drastically exacerbated. She was pregnant, so now she lived with the ever-growing fear — one of the worst to befall a Nisei — that she might be carrying a black man’s child. Not even white Hawaiians, she knew, could live with what was then considered a shame worse than death. In Yoko’s Japan it had always been accepted that black Americans were no better than savages. They were considered highly potent sexually but almost as low on the evolutionary ladder as the Chinese, those Chinese who had fled their turbulent country to Hawaii now taking a special, if quiet, delight in seeing the Nisei rounded up, receiving what the Chinese deemed the Nisei’s comeuppance. It was only fitting, from the Chinese view, that the Japanese pay not only for their attack against America but also for their continuing invasion of the Chinese homeland, memories of Nippon’s aggression in Manchuria and the rape of Nanking still fresh in the minds of many Chinese who had fled their homeland to escape the Japanese.
If there was any chance of Tayama’s hatred of the U.S. fading in the future, it was dashed forever on the evening of Sunday, March 15, 1942, when Yoko, despite the prohibitions of her deep Shinto upbringing, tried to abort her pregnancy with a coat hanger in the women’s barracks washroom. Septicemia quickly set in and soon she went into shock. She was rushed to Queen’s Hospital but “expired following abortion of Caucasian/Asian fetus,” as the coroner’s report put it, “at 0315, March 17/42.”
From that day on, Tayama Omura, his hatred further fueled later by the fact that both his sisters were killed, along with tens of thousands of his fellow Japanese, by the A-bomb the Americans dropped on Nagasaki, which ended the war, became an implacable foe of the United States. The subsequent apologies by the U.S. government years later for its wartime treatment of Americans of Japanese descent did nothing to mitigate his hatred, so that during the Korean War of the early 1950s when he was approached by North Korea’s RDEI, Research Department for External Intelligence, he was ripe for recruitment to spy on America’s strategically vital Pacific base in Hawaii. If revenge hadn’t been motivation enough, he was brusquely informed by the Kempei Tai that his two brothers, who had surrendered with the other Japanese divisions in Korea at World War II’s end, might be eventually freed and repatriated by Pyongyang. But it was an unnecessary inducement, for what had previously been a resented task of espionage, through blackmail, against the Americans had now become a zealous and ongoing revenge for the death of his beloved Yoko and his two sisters.
And so, by the time General Douglas Freeman and his eight fellow “nonactive” list team members were en route on their black-ops Payback mission, the defiant but ever-cautious, hardworking Omura, the “quiet old guy” who had built up a chain of teriyaki/rice and sushi stalls throughout the islands after the war and who, in his quietude, didn’t seem to bear any residual animosity against America for its treatment of Japanese-American immigrants during the war, had developed one of the most sophisticated North Korean espionage rings in the United States.
Following what the international media were calling a “terrorist” attack in America against the three airliners, North Korean Intelligence HQ in Pyongyang issued a red alert to its agents throughout the world. Omura’s network was specifically ordered to watch for any unusual U.S. military activity in Hawaii, as it was the most likely stopover and refueling base for any U.S. SpecOps “Asian target” mission launched from America’s West Coast — the big U.S. base in Yokohama the most likely springboard after Hawaii.
Omura’s espionage ring went into high gear. One of his agents, a worker at the huge military airbase adjacent to Honolulu’s civilian airport, saw a huge plane land that same evening. With his folding NVG zoom-lens video camera he got a shot of nine men plus the pilot and air crew who alighted from the huge cavernous jungle- green/khaki aircraft. Ten minutes later Omura’s agent was able to take infrared stills of the loading of what he estimated was a sixty-to seventy-foot-long fuselage with six wheels, two at either end and two in the middle. It was encased in U.S. Army khaki all-weather wrap and had three equally spaced bumps, like engine blocks, along the top, the wrap, it occurred to Omura’s agent, the same kind in which the Americans had transported aircraft and helicopters from Hawaii to Camrahn Bay during the Vietnam War. But he reported that he could see no rotor blades attached, assuming these, as was usual during transport, had been bundled inside the huge Galaxy.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Sometimes,” colonel Kim said, upon receiving the coded e-mail message, “the Americans wrap the rotors separately from the main body of the helicopter like a collapsed beach umbrella. Unfortunately our agent’s NVG camera’s angle has obviously not penetrated deeper into the plane’s interior.”
“It looks to me, Comrade Colonel,” suggested his second in command, Major Park, “that it
“Like their original Chinook,” said Colonel Kim, “only a smaller, faster
The colonel thought hard, his dour grimace born of the ruthless competition for promotion in a country that prided itself in being the last true Communist stronghold in a capitalist-corrupted world. He looked again at Omura’s spy’s report. In his mind’s eye Colonel Kim was going over the various types of U.S. helos, trying to discern what kind of load the American Special Forces could be carrying. One of the men in the infrared stills, Omura’s message informed him, was definitely the legendary Freeman who, Kim remembered, had made a name for himself against the Siberian Sixth Armored. But he was retired, wasn’t he? And what heavy load was the helo, if it
“Special weapons?” suggested Major Park. “To attack the heavily defended depot at Kosong?”
“Are you sure,” put in Lieutenant Rhee of Coastal Defense Unit 5, “the Americans’ target is Kosong? Perhaps they are only going as far as Japan?”
