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 of 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
