And what a strike it will be, Hiroki thought. He had ferreted out some of Yamamoto's still-developing plan to attack Pearl Harbor. Brilliant. He almost wanted to laugh aloud now as he thought of it. The admiral had been such a fierce opponent of war with the United States that Hiroki had wondered if he could be counted on as Commander of the Combined Fleet. But apparently, once he had accepted the inevitability of the war he did not want, he had become a tiger.
Yes. Everything was perfect.
The limbless Elder Yonai translated Elder Kakuichi's hand signs: " ‘How is your search for the scrolls progressing?' "
"Very slowly, I'm afraid," Hiroki said, knowing his evasiveness was as transparent as spring water.
Shimazu and the three Elders—even the eyeless Ryusaku—were staring at him, and he felt himself wilt. How was it he could bend a nation to his vision and yet still feel like a child when seated before these aging, reclusive monks? Sometimes he resented the awe the Order inspired in him.
"I know you are working hard to assure Japan's future and see that she fulfills her destiny," Shimazu said gravely, "but you must not submerge yourself so completely in political activities that you lose sight of your quest. Remember the vision: In the coming war, Japan must have the Black Winds."
Hiroki closed his eyes. He could not find enough hours in the day. If only he was free to have others look for him, if only the loss of the scrolls did not have to be such a closely guarded secret.
Elder Ryusaku said, "I understand that Yajima has given up his search of the Kanto plain and turned south. Apparently he has gleaned some information that leads him there. I hope you will shoulder your share of the burden of this quest. It is important to the Emperor and all of Japan. Do not fail us."
"I shall not," Hiroki said with a confidence he did not feel, for he had no idea where he would find the time to do the painstaking searches the quest required.
He suddenly straightened his back and bowed.
"I shall not."
* * *
"You look ready to bite someone," Shigeo said as he walked into Matsuo's cramped, jumbled office at Intelligence headquarters.
"I am losing patience with America," Matsuo growled.
"You?"
"Perhaps we really are headed for war."
Matsuo sat and ground his teeth as he thought about the American embargo.
They want war with us. The only explanation.
He was angry. He had been talking down the prospects of war with the United States to everyone he knew, hoping that would somehow make a difference. But instead, the events of the past few weeks had changed the prospects from hopefully unlikely to inevitable. As it stood now, Japan would either have to accept a hobbled, crippled, infirm existence …
…or go to war.
Which suddenly made his intelligence gathering all the more crucial. His mind buzzed with facts and figures, elevations, depressions, glide paths, and on and on. Commander Fuchida wanted absolute confirmation that the water around Ford Island where the battleships and carriers would be moored was truly only forty-five feet deep. He was having trouble with the bomber-borne torpedoes—they were plunging to the bottom and lodging in the mud during practice runs—and he and Commander Genda were desperate to find a solution. Genda also had to know the thickness of the steel plates on the decks of the battleships so he would be able to devise the proper armor-piercing fittings for the bombs.
Details, details! They made his head ache.
Shigeo dropped a photo on his desk. "It appears that the watchers are being watched."
Matsuo picked up the photo. "What's this?"
"It was taken out one of the rear windows of our Hawaiian Consulate."
"It's just a bunch of trees."
Shigeo pointed to one of those trees. "Not quite. There's someone in one of those trees."
"Really?"
"Yes. Someone surveys the consulate regularly. This fellow is the most frequent peeper."
Shigeo dropped another photo on the desk. A different lens had been used, clearly revealing the figure of a man in one of the trees studying the consulate through a pair of field glasses. His face was obscured by his hands and the field glasses themselves.
"I wonder who he's with—FBI or ONI?"
"We waited for him to come out from the trees and took this." Shigeo dropped a third photo on the desk. It showed a sandy-haired man of about thirty opening a car door. "He's with ONI. His name is—"
"Frank Slater!" Matsuo cried.
Shigeo was dumbfounded. "How—?"
Matsuo barely heard him. Frank Slater, on Oahu with US Naval Intelligence, was keeping an eye on the Japanese Consulate. Incredible.
Yet there was a queer sort of logic to it. Frank's father had been involved with the Navy, and Frank knew Japanese—Matsuo had taught him most of it. What more natural place for him to be stationed than Oahu?
"But we only found out about him today. How could you—?"
"Did you actually think you were going to tell me something I didn't already know?" Matsuo said. It never hurt to keep Shigeo slightly off balance. It made him work harder. "What else do you know about him?"
"Well… he's been on the island four years, works mostly as a translator, and—oh, yes, he has a Japanese wife."
A Japanese wife, Matsuo thought. How interesting.
"Good. Now that you know who he is, what are you going to do about him?"
"For one thing," Shigeo said, "I'm going to inform the consulate to keep its more sensitive contacts out of the backyard on Nuuanu Avenue. For another, I'm going to have some of our people investigate Lieutenant Slater's wife. Maybe we can persuade her to—"
"Stop right there. You'll do nothing of the sort."
Shigeo looked confused. "We do it all the time. It's standard procedure when an American is married to a Japanese."
Matsuo's mind raced. Although time had tempered somewhat his youthful hatred for Frank Slater, he still harbored only contempt for the man. He was a potential enemy and Matsuo should have been willing—even anxious—to do anything necessary to squeeze some intelligence out of him. Anything.
Yet to attempt to subvert Frank's Japanese wife…
He shook his head. There had to be limits, even to what he would condone in the name of intelligence. But he couldn't let Shigeo know there was anything personal in the decision.
"It might alert him. If he knows we're on to him, he might decide we know about his little treetop surveillance and drop it. But if he keeps it up, we can let him see only those people and activities we want him to see in the backyard of the consulate. And that might work to our advantage."
Shigeo shrugged and nodded. "I suppose so." But he didn't seem convinced.
"Forget Frank Slater's wife. Concentrate instead on learning the thickness of the armor plating on the Arizona's deck."
He felt his anger surge up again. If it was war the Americans wanted, it was war they would have—a war like they had never known.
NOVEMBER
HONOLULU
Zach was back in port, and I could tell he was angry. He’d put in a request to CINCPAC headquarters to meet with Saburo Kurusu, Japan's ambassador-at-large and general international troubleshooter, while he was passing through Hawaii, supposedly on a peace mission to the States.
"Kurusu and I go back a ways," he told me as we sat in my cubicle in the downtown DIO building. "I know I could have squeezed something out of him, maybe get a feel for how sincere this so-called message of peace he's ferrying to Washington is."
"They wouldn't okay it?"
He shook his head. "I got orders that kept me on ship doing nothing until he was gone."
I could sense his frustration. It mirrored my own. No one seemed to be taking Naval Intelligence seriously. Since Admiral Turner had taken over War Plans last year, he had bullied the intelligence services into funneling all their gatherings through his office. ONI was nothing more than a note-keeping operation now. We could gather and translate and
pass on, but we could issue no warnings, no alerts. Everything had to go through War Plans and then maybe—if Turner saw fit—some of it would be disseminated back to us. Turner had complete control of all service intelligence. No wonder they called him Terrible Turner.
And then just last month, the powers that be had named Rear Admiral Wilkinson as Chief of Naval Intelligence—our fourth chief in a year.
Zach said, "I know Ping—"
" ‘Ping'?"
" Wilkinson’s nickname. He was three years ahead of me at the Academy. A good man. Medal of Honor and all."
"But he's never had a damn thing to do with any sort of intelligence in his entire career."
"Neither has your Captain Thornton. It seems to be a pattern, doesn't it?"
"A pattern of stupidity."
Zach leaned forward. "Look. You've got a job to do. You go ahead and do that job as best as you can in spite of what's going on at the top, figuring that somewhere along the line it will make a difference. And above all else, you keep your mouth shut when it comes to criticizing how things are being handled at the top."
"Like you?" I said with a laugh.
Everyone in Naval Intelligence knew how outspoken Zach had been about the administration of ONI.
His expression was grim. "No. Not like me. Look where I am: piloting a cruiser."
I said nothing. He’d made his point.
"You get Purple magic yet?" he asked.
"No. An eighth machine became available and I pleaded for it, but it went to London."
"London! The Brits already have two."
"I know."
He shook his head in disgust. "Keep watching the skies, my friend. Watch for an air attack on Pearl. And soon. Tojo became the Japanese premier last month."
"I know. Kamisori—‘the Razor.' Not a nickname to give one much faith in Kurusu's ‘mission of peace."
"That's why I wanted a chance to speak to him. I know Tojo. He's as militaristic and nationalistic as they come. He's not particularly bright, but he's very persuasive. And those he can't persuade, he'll blackmail. He used to command the Kempeitai, the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo, and still has strong ties there. I know for a fact that he's got dossiers on just above everyone in the Japanese government. He became premier without giving up the posts of War Minister and Home Minister. Believe me, he did not come into all that power simply on brains and good looks."
We laughed about that, then Zach went back to the Salt Lake City and I went home to Meiko. My time with her was the only time I could relax and feel real again. Most days my jaw ached from gritting my teeth. After my talk with Zach, I needed her more than ever.
The apartment was empty when I got home so I fiddled with some of the paperwork I'd brought from Pearl. I knew where Meiko was: walking the Ala Moana beach. She did that a lot. I was pretty sure she was content being married to me. I did my best to make her happy, but it was so hard to tell with someone like Meiko. She wasn't raised to expect love and happiness in marriage. If it happened—fine. A bonus. But love was not the primary purpose of marriage for the Japanese. Preservation of the family and, through the family, the social order—that's what marriage was all about in Japan.
But those walks—I had a feeling she was thinking about him, about Matsuo. She never mentioned him but I sensed she wasn't over him yet, that she might never be. I sensed that he had touched a place in her that I hadn't found yet.
But I was searching for it, searching all the time.
TOKYO
Matsuo tossed and rolled on the futon in his apartment. The tension, the excitement, the electric charge of the coming conflict, had made sleep increasingly difficult, almost impossible at times. The very air seemed to crackle with the all-or-nothing sentiments of the premier and his supporters.
Matsuo had taken an instant disliking to General Hideki Tojo. He found the man's personal manner offensive, particularly in his almost slavish imitation of the German fascists. Tojo was considered by many to be a clear thinker and an incisive speaker. Matsuo did not share that opinion, deciding that the general probably earned that reputation because he was much more direct than most in his pattern of speech, cutting through the typical indirection of Japanese discussion.
But he had to admit the man was effective as a leader. He had infused the country with a war mentality. He had set it in motion and was increasing the momentum. Even Matsuo felt himself caught up in the heady atmosphere, the giddy challenge of risking everything on a national level.
He was even beginning to think there might be a chance of winning. In the hours before dawn when he would lie awake and try to sort out and order the myriad facts he had been accumulating since his first conference with Yamamoto, a small voice would whisper, This is madness. Madness! He would listen and agree. But during the day, the frenetic commotion of his work schedule would drown it out.
All was ready. Commander Genda had solved the problem of the nose-diving torpedoes by fixing simple wooden stabilizers to their fins. Fins had been fitted on armor-piercing shells, readying them for the sixteen-inch armor plate of the battleship decks. The cruise ship, Taiyo Maru, had made a test run along the intended course of the carrier fleet, going north and then running east halfway between the Aleutians and Midway, then turning south toward the Hawaiians. Not a single American vessel or plane was sighted during the entire trip.
With the arrival of the carrier Shokaku just yesterday, the strike force of carriers, destroyers, cruisers, submarines, and tankers—thirty-two ships in all—was now fully assembled at Tankan Bay in the chilly Kuriles and awaiting the word to go.
No troop ships were coming along. Tojo and his War Ministry had vetoed the plan to take and hold the Hawaiians because of the extra manpower it would involve. Matsuo suspected that Japan would regret that decision, but it was out of his hands.
As the sky began to turn the color of the April cherry blossoms on the banks of the Edogawa, Matsuo gave up on sleep. He rolled up his futon, stowed it in the closet, and went outside for the traditional cold morning bath.
* * *
When he arrived at Naval Intelligence, Shigeo was already there. Although Matsuo had said not a word to him of Yamamoto's plan, Shigeo had deduced what was afoot long ago. He had the good manners, however, not to mention it, although his increased enthusiasm for Pearl Harbor intelligence spoke volumes.
He handed Matsuo some recent aerial photographs of Pearl. They were stunning.
"Where did you get these?"
"I had one of our people take a tourist sight-seeing flight in a rental plane out of John Rogers Airport. As you can see, the Pearl anchorage is filling up. Lots of big ships, two of them major carriers—the Lexington and the Enterprise."
Matsuo studied the top photo. "You're sure of their identity?"
"Confirmed and reconfirmed."
"Battleships?"
"Four in port."
Matsuo shuffled through the photos. The four battleships anchored off Ford Island in the middle of the harbor looked utterly defenseless. Something about that bothered him. Shigeo must have noted his troubled expression.
"Something wrong?" he said as he lit another cigarette.
"I don't know. I have a strange feeling about all this."
"Why? It's perfect!"
"Perhaps it's too perfect."
The harbor was so open, the ships so vulnerable, it all gave Matsuo a vague, eerie sense of invitation, as if a giant finger were beckoning behind the photographs.
But that was ridiculous.
He handed the packet back to Shigeo and glanced through the other piles of prints on the desk—photos of the Schofield, Wheeler, Hickam, and Ewa airbases, and many of the beaches west of Pearl Harbor and eastward toward Honolulu. He had ordered these in anticipation of the now-scrubbed invasion of the island.
He came upon one that showed a lone woman strolling the sand near the waterline. He laughed and held it up to Shigeo.
"Your photographer has an eye for the women as well as
the military installations."
Shigeo grinned. "Sure. Helps maintain the cover of a camera hobbyist."
Matsuo was about to toss the photo back into the pile when something about the woman caught his eye. It was a long shot and her facial features were blurred, but something about the shape of her head, the way she held her shoulders struck a resonance in a corner of his memory. Something familiar about her. The memory dangled just out of reach.
"You like her?" Shigeo said. "She's a pretty one."
"How can you tell? You can't see her face."
"Oh, we've got plenty of other shots of her. She walks that stretch of beach frequently. She's married to an intelligence officer. You said not to approach her, but I felt it wouldn't hurt to build a photo file on her anyway."
The memory was creeping closer… almost in sight now…
"I don't remember telling you not to approach anyone."
"You most certainly did. Back in August. You were pretty emphatic about it, too: Leave Lieutenant Frank Slater's wife alone."
Mrs. Frank Slater!
And then it came to him. The woman in the photo—she reminded him of Meiko. Frank had known Meiko, had been very obviously attracted to her during their college years. Had he found and married someone who resembled her?
An eerie thought. A chill ran up Matsuo's spine.
"What's Mrs. Slater's name?"
Shigeo pulled a slim file from a drawer. He flipped through it and pulled out a white card.
"Meiko. Meiko Slater."
Matsuo felt his legs go soft on him. He quickly pulled a chair around from the side of the desk and dropped into it. He opened his mouth to speak but no sound came. Finally he managed a single word.
"Photos."
Shigeo gave him a strange look as he handed him the file. Matsuo ignored him. Didn't even bother with attempting an explanation. He simply sat there with the file in his hands, trembling inside and out.
"Are you all right? You look like you're going to be sick."