The Gate

CHAPTER 10

Lake waited in the small foyer outside Dr. Harmon’s office. Araki had had both of them dropped off from the stealth ship at a deserted pier several miles south of San Francisco along the rough coastline there that he obviously had scouted out at some earlier time. A van was parked at a shopping center a mile inland and Araki had the keys. Lake had had Araki drop him at one of his bolt-holes in a motel where he’d caught a couple of hours sleep before taking the BART to the campus.

Lake could only continue to marvel at the extent of the CPI’s operation. If nothing else came of this, Lake decided, he would have to alert Feliks to the capabilities of their Japanese counterparts and the ease with which they moved in the United States and the waters just off the coast. At the very least, Lake mused, as he heard the click-click of a lady’s heels come down the hallway, he might get a Gold MasterCard.

Dr. Harmon graced Lake with a smile as she opened the door. “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she said. “You don’t look like you had the most restful night.”

“I didn’t,” Lake said. He pointed. “I” found your box and brought it back.”

“Where did you find it?” Harmon asked as she unlocked the door to her office.

Lake followed her in. “I don’t suppose you have any coffee?” he asked.

“I can make a pot,” she replied, turning to one of the bookcases and uncovering an old coffeemaker from behind a pile of books.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Lake asked as she came back in with a pot full of water.

“Only if I can join you,” she said. She took the offered cigarette. “This building is tobacco-free, as all the buildings on campus are; but no ever really comes in here, so I think we can get away with one or two.” Her eyes’ narrowed “Your hands are shaking.”

That surprised Lake. He looked down. His hands were shaking.

“What happened?” she asked.

With the hiss Of the water shifting through the coffeepot in the background, Lake began the story of the previous evening. He kept out many of the details, but quickly gave her a sketch of events from taking off in the helicopter to being rescued by Araki/the discovery of the messages to 1-24, and being brought to shore.

When he was done, Harmon was shaking her head. “I don’t know whether to believe you or think that’s the most outrageous story I’ve ever heard.”

“I don’t have any proof—” Lake began, but he paused as she raised a hand.

“I believe you,” Harmon said.

“What?” “I said I believe you. I believed you yesterday and I believe you today.”

“Why?” Lake asked.

Harmon smiled. “Let’s say it’s my own woman’s intuition.”

“I don’t think that’s enough to—”

“Would you stop?” she said. “You just can’t keep questioning everything and everyone.”

Lake blinked as she took both his hands in hers. They felt wonderfully warm. Her eyes locked into his. “You’re alone, aren’t you? All alone?”

Lake was so taken aback that he answered honestly. “Yes.”

“Well, right now you’re not,” she said. Then he saw her own shoulders twitch and she withdrew her hands and the warmth was gone. “I’m a historian after all,” she added. “I know that very strange things go on all the time — the old truth-is-stranger-than-fiction line. I’m just glad you made it out alive.”

To that Lake had no reply. He was just looking down at his hands, remembering the feeling of hers.

“Let me see the messages,” Harmon said, breaking the silence. Lake handed her the file and flipped it open to the first one. He then pointed out the second and third ones to 1-24.

“They must have been in dire straits to use the words “Genzai Bakudan’ openly in the second message,” Harmon noted. “That was a mistake.”

“Any idea what Cyclone or Forest are the code words for?” Lake asked.

“Not off the top of my head,” Harmon replied. “The U.S. Navy in World War II broke the Japanese encryption code early on. But code words for specific locations such as these are different.

“In late May 1942, U.S. Navy analysts were intercepting and decrypting quite a bit of traffic that indicated that the Japanese were preparing a major operation. They could decrypt everything, including the code word of the intended target: XXXX. The problem was, like us, they didn’t know where XXXX was. They suspected it might be Midway Island, but the Japanese plan was so complex with so many different feints and maneuvers, it was hard to tell.

“So the code breakers devised a simple plan. They had the American forces on Midway send a radio message in the clear that they knew the Japanese would intercept. The message seemed quite innocent, simply stating that the water desalinator on Midway had broken and certain repair parts were needed.

“A couple of days later, they intercepted a Japanese message to the fleet at sea. When it was decoded, it said that XXXX’s water desalinator had broken. Thus the U.S. Navy knew that the main Japanese thrust was aimed at Midway.” “Pretty ingenious,” Lake said. “The only problem is that we’re fifty years too late to be sending any messages using these code words.” He looked at the map of the Pacific on the wall behind her desk. “Do you have any idea what would be a priority target for a Japanese atomic bomb that late in the war?”

“For an atomic weapon delivered by submarine?” Harmon mused out loud. “My first guess would be the Allied fleet. By the time of those messages Okinawa had been taken and the home islands were under constant air attack. The Japanese were waiting for the final amphibious assault. Their number one threat was the Allied invasion fleet.”

“And where was that in August 1945?” Lake asked.

Harmon stood and stabbed her finger at the map. “Here. The Ulithi anchorage.”

Lake had expected an answer such as Pearl Harbor or Manila. “I’ve never heard of Ulithi.”

“Most people haven’t,” Harmon said. “It’s in the Caroline Islands, centrally located between the two thrusts the U.S. was making toward Japan; from the sea, island hopping, and MacArthur’s through the Philippines.

“Actually there’s not much land at Ulithi, which is why I think it would be a perfect target for a submarine-launched atomic attack. Ulithi is basically a series of atolls surrounding a deep-water anchorage. The Navy desperately needed such an anchorage in this part of the Pacific from which to stage their forces. They learned a bitter lesson in December 1944 when a typhoon hit Task Force 38, sinking three destroyers and damaging numerous other ships. That’s the typhoon that the Caine Mutiny was based upon. I’d say there’s a possibility that the Cyclone code name might reflect the fact that IF 38 sheltered at Ulithi right after the typhoon.”

Lake frowned. “I don’t think it would be that easy. Code names are usually decided upon by some staff wienie sitting behind a desk and aren’t supposed to have any relationship to whatever it is they are the code name for. Usually there’s just a list of words and the staff officer is just supposed to use the next one on the list.”

“Sounds like you know something about this,” Harmon probed.

“So what was at Ulithi in August 1945?” Lake asked, ignoring her comment.

“In August 1945 most of the invasion fleet was gathered there in the anchorage preparing and refitting for the assault on Japan. Several carrier task forces were conducting operations against the mainland, but the troop transports, supply ships, and quite a number of combatant ships would have been there. Destroying the ships at Ulithi and making the anchorage unusable due to radioactivity would have severely set back the American invasion timetable for probably a year. Since the invasion was planned for ‘46, that means it would have to be put off to ‘47.

“It’s hard to say whether the American public would have stood for two more years of war,” Harmon added. “There was a great outcry over troops being shipped from Europe to the Pacific theater. If the Japanese could have destroyed the fleet at Ulithi, they might have been able to sue for peace.”

Lake looked at the map. It made tactical sense. The Ulithi anchorage wasn’t that far from the Sea of Japan. “How would they do it, though?” Lake wondered. “Would they sneak in at night and try to off load the bomb?”

Harmon shook her head. “I think that whoever armed the bomb would still be with it when it was supposed to go off. I think they would put it on a midget sub that they would launch to conduct a kamikaze attack.”

“So we’re back to the original question,” Lake said. “Where’s the bomb now?”

“We have to find out what happened to 1-24,” Harmon said. “And there’s something else.”

“What’s that?”

“I said that I think Ulithi atoll would be the primary target for the Japanese bomb if they wanted to stop the Allied fleet. But the second message diverts the 1-24 from the primary target to the secondary one, Forest.” She was looking at the map. “So where’s Forest?”

“That’s your province,” Lake said. “Let’s see if we can’t track down the fate of 1-24 and then maybe we can get a liae on Cyclone and Forest.”

“To the basement,” Harmon said. * “To the basement,” Lake echoed.

Nishin wasn’t worried about Cyclone or Forest or 1-24. That was Nakanga’s province. Nishin’s orders were to find out who the American was and who he worked for. He wasn’t glad he hadn’t killed Okomo as he headed toward the Japan Center, but he did realize that he had let emotion almost cause him to commit actions that now would have been detrimental to the success of the mission.

He still needed the Yakuza, much as he didn’t want to admit it. The same guard was waiting in the restaurant foyer and without a word he led Nishin up to the enclosed roof after searching him.

Okomo did not look like he had spent the night at sea and fought a pitched battle with North Korean commandos. He was seated at the head of his table, underlings lining the table on either side. “You would be dead right now if your friend Nakanga was not so efficient. The money is in my account. What do you want? Our business is done.”

“I need information.”

Okomo just stared at him. There were glares from the others around the table.

“Oyabun,” Nishin reluctantly added.

Okomo was still silent.

“The North Koreans got their guns from an American. He met them at Fort Point to make the exchange, but they did not pay him. They tried to kill him, but he escaped. I need to find out about this American, Oyabun.” Nishin didn’t add the information that the American had gone down in the Am Nok Sung. That would pique the Yakuza’s interest too much. “We will pay.”

“Of course you will pay,” Okomo said.

Nishin stared into the flat black eyes of the old man. He tensed his stomach muscles, feeling the reassuring presence of the ice scraper poking into the flesh. The old man was dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than Nakanga knew.

“I will inform you when I find something out.” Okomo waved a hand dismissing him. Once Nishin was gone, Okomo slowly walked back to the rear elevator to make his report.

It was hot down in the basement of Wellman Hall. Lake’s shirt was soaked with sweat as he hauled^ boxes to the old wood desk that Harmon was seated at. She was scanning documents from January 1945 on, searching for any other reference to the code words Cyclone or Forest. Since Lake couldn’t read the Japanese text, he was reduced to being the errand boy. He didn’t mind. It gave his mind a chance to relax and unwind from the stress of the past several days. And he could also watch her without her knowing. He found himself mesmerized by the way the scant lighting reflected off her face and glowed through her hair. Her eyes flickered back and forth over the paper, then she glanced up, catching him watching and smiled, and he looked away. She returned to reading.

Lake was also glad to be in the basement because it meant his cellular phone wouldn’t ring. He had now been out of touch with Feliks and the Ranch well past when he should have checked in.

As he deposited another box on the desk, Harmon looked up. “What happened to your neck?”

Lake was surprised at her directness. People rarely asked, not so much because of politeness, but because Lake tried to always project an image that discouraged people from asking him questions.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“I can listen and read at the same time. You have nothing else to do,” she added.

Lake sat down on a metal folding chair on the other side of the desk. “I’ll make it a short story. It happened a while back. Do you remember when that plane with all those troops coming from the peacekeeping mission in the Sinai crashed in Gander and they were all killed?”

Harmon nodded. “Yes. The official cause, if I remember rightly, was ice on the wings.”

“Yeah, that was the official story, but there were some who thought it was a bomb that destroyed the plane. And someone in our government thought they knew who might have planted that bomb. And someone in the chain of command felt that action in retaliation ought to be taken.”

“Revenge?” Harmon asked, shutting one file and opening another.

“No, not really. More along the lines of keeping the scales even. You hurt me, I hurt you. With the logical extension that the other guy then will think twice before hurting you again. So I was on the team that was picked to do the hurting back.”

“Were you with the same organization that you’re with now?” Harmon asked.

“No. Back then I was in the SEALs. Naval Special Warfare Unit Two, stationed in Coronado, California. They selected a squad from my platoon. Six men. I was the leader. We trained with some Agency guy who then picked two of us: me and my chief NCO, Rick Masters. The CIA man then briefed us. Our mission was to infiltrate into a certain country, which I will leave unnamed — and kill the man who had supposedly been the mastermind behind the bomb plot.”

Harmon arched her eyebrows. “Did they have any proof?”

“They didn’t show us any,” Lake said dryly. “So the government…” Harmon’s voice trailed off.

“Yes,” Lake said, “the U.S. government really does shit like that. How do you think we’ve managed to keep terrorism from our shores for so long? You don’t scare the bad guys by being nice. You’ scare them by being meaner than they are.”

“So did you succeed in being mean?” Harmon asked. She had stopped reading. All her attention was on Lake.

“Yes.”

“And the scar?”

Lake had been debriefed about the mission, but he had never told anyone outside of official channels about it. He wasn’t sure why he had even answered her question about the scar. This entire mission seemed out-of-sorts. Too many pieces that didn’t seem to fit other than the fact that Lake had stumbled across them. He wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. The events of the last several days he could handle piecemeal as they came up, but the cumulative effect was overwhelming. Being here in this dark archive basement seemed like a refuge from all that. Especially with Peggy Harmon sitting across from him.

He knew there was no evidence to prove what he was saying. It was just like everything else he had told her. And he felt a need to talk, to let out the darkness that had been in him for so many years.

“Rick and I infiltrated the target country after locking out of a submarine,” he said.

“Lockout?”

“The sub stayed submerged,” Lake said. “Rick and I went in to the escape hatch, it filled with water, then we i opened up the outer hatch and swam away. We were using rebreathers so we could stay under for quite a while and didn’t have any bubbles coming up to the surface. We swam in, landed, cached our gear, and made our way to the target.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“It sounds simple, but it wasn’t,” Lake acknowledged. “The swell was almost six feet at the surface and our rebreathers required that we stay within ten feet of the surface. That meant we caught the surface effect quite severely. It was pitch black and we were fighting a cross shore current. We were lucky to make it ashore at the right place. We had to cross the beach, cut through a fence-they have a fence along the entire shoreline there — and move inland a couple of hundred meters before we could hide our rebreathers.”

Lake remembered the adrenaline rush more than anything else. “I was only five years out of—” He paused. He couldn’t tell her about the Naval Academy. That would give her a way of finding out who he was. And just as quickly as he thought it, he felt a sharp twist of disgust with himself and the life he was leading. Always the deception. “I was only five years in the Navy. This was my first live mission. Rick had been shot at before — he was a twenty-year man, so I followed his lead, even though I was the ranking man.” That was an understatement, Lake knew. Rick Masters had been his mentor for two years, ever since he had joined the SEALs. They’d taught Lake a lot in SEAL school at Coronado, but the real learning had begun the first day he’d shaken the hand of the gri/zled old veteran who was the team’s senior noncommissioned officer. In the SEALs the man with the most experience commanded, not the man with the most rank on his shoulder. It made the unit better.

“Our target was living in a small house not too far in from the beach at a camp where they trained people like him. Rick led the way using the information the CIA had given us. We found the building where our target was supposed to be sleeping. It was guarded by two men. We killed them with silenced pistols.”

That had been the first time Lake had ever killed or used a Hush Puppy. Kneeling in the dark, feeling Rick’s hulking presence at his side, the older man whispering out a three count and both firing at the same time. The two guards crumpling to the ground, their brains splattered against the cinder-block wall behind them. There was no time then to think or feel about it. That would come later, and by the time later came there was much more to think and feel about.

“We went into the building fast. It was one story, only three rooms. The target was sleeping in the back room.” Lake’s voice, had gone flat. He was reciting it just as he had in the debriefing. “He was just sitting up when we kicked open the door to his room. We both fired and killed him. We immediately left the building.

“Everything had gone exactly as planned up to that point. Then it went to shit. The hole in the fence must have been found. We had tied it back together with fishing line so it wouldn’t be so obvious, but one of the sentries must have spotted it. Then they had followed our trail to the cache site. There were six men standing right where we’d left the rebreathers. They weren’t exactly expecting us to come up. They were too excited over finding the gear. We weren’t expecting them to be standing there. It was one big jug-fuck.” Lake shook his head. “We came tearing down this ravine and there were these guys. Rick just started shooting and I followed suit. They fired back and it was like World War III. We hit four of them and the other two went to earth right on top of our gear. We heard other guards yelling in the distance and these two guys were guiding them in.

“Rick grabbed me. He yelled in my ear for us to forget the gear and head for the beach. So we did a left-face, scrambled up the slope of the ravine, and then made our way shoreward in the next ravine. The guys back at the cache site were still shooting; we could see their tracers flying through the sky.

“We came to the fence, except not at the point where we had cut the hole. That was about two hundred meters farther up the beach and we could see flashlights up there. So we used our wire cutters and went to work where we were. But by that time the sentries were out in force. A squad came up the fence from the south and spotted us. They opened fire and hit Rick in the initial burst. He went down. I fired over his body and made the bad guys take cover.”

Lake finally paused in his story and looked at Harmon. She was perfectly still, as if any movement on her part might derail his memories, but he was into it now. He felt the gun in his hand, jerking from the recoil as he fired at muzzle flashes. Rick lying at his feet, the sound of surf pounding, the crack of bullets flying by. If there had been any other expression on her face, any movement on her part, he knew he couldn’t go on. But there was something about her that drew him in and the story out.

“Rick was alive. I grabbed him and pulled him away from the fence, then I used a satchel charge to blow it. No more time for niceties. I just pulled the activating cord and threw it at the fence. It blew and there was a gap. I grabbed Rick and threw him over my shoulders.”

Lake didn’t add that Rick demanded that Lake leave him. That the older man had insisted that he be left behind to cover Lake’s withdrawal. That he knew his wounds were too severe to make it back to the sub. For the first time since he had joined his SEAL team, Lake had ignored his senior NCO.

“I ran across the beach.” Lake shrugged. “I don’t know why I wasn’t hit. I wasn’t exactly setting a world record in the fifty-yard dash with Rick on my shoulders. I hit the water still running. When I was waist-deep I realized I was in a little bit of a predicament hauling Rick. I quickly took the safety lines from around my waist and hooked it into his, but I couldn’t swim like that. So I looped it around my neck.”

Lake touched his scars. “I finned with my legs and pulled with my arms as hard as possible to get out of range from the shore. By then the rope had dug in to my skin so far I couldn’t get it out so I just kept it there. I swam for six hours to get to the rendezvous site.. My biggest concern was that the blood from Rick’s wounds and my neck would attract sharks.”

He didn’t add in the agony of the rope ripping into the flesh and then the salt water washing over it with each stroke. The rope buried into the torn and swollen flesh, sliding back and forth just a little bit each time. The shifting from swimming on his back to his stomach then back again to use different muscles, each move tearing new flesh around his neck.

“The sub was at the rendezvous spot even though we were late. They surfaced and pulled us in.” Lake let out a deep breath. “Rick was dead.”

When Lake didn’t say any more for a minute, Harmon finally spoke. “I’m sorry.”

“I kind of knew he was dead shortly after leaving the beach,” Lake said. “He was too hard core of an old cuss to just be towed along like I was doing. I didn’t ever stop to check, though.”

“But…” Harmon’s voice trailed off.

“But why. didn’t I leave him if he was dead?” Lake asked.

Harmon nodded. “He must have slowed you down. What if the submarine had not waited and left your pickup point?”

“I couldn’t abandon him dead or alive,” Lake said flatly. He pointed at the box on the desk. “Enough chitchat. Let’s get back to work.”

“I had to know,” Harmon said. She stood and walked behind him. Her hands reached up and she lightly touched his neck, her long fingers tracing the knotted flesh.

“Know what?” Lake was caught off guard, still feeling the resonating effects of telling her what had happened so many years ago and the unexpected pressure of her hands.

“Know who you were. Are,” she amended.

“Why?”

“Always the questions,” she said with a low laugh. She withdrew her hands and walked back around the desk and tapped the paper in front of her. “So I could decide if I should tell you what Cyclone and Forest stood for.”

Lake slowly sat down and waited.

“I have an earlier Japanese message,” Harmon continued. “It tracks the American Task Force 54 in January and February of 1945. IF 54 had six battleships, five cruisers, and sixteen destroyers in it, so the Japanese were very concerned as to its whereabouts. In the. beginning of 1945 it was at both Cyclone and Forest, according to these decoded messages sent out to the Japanese fleet commanders. Since / know from history where Task Force 54 sailed to and from in those days, I know what Cyclone and Forest stand for.”

Lake continued to wait. The mood in the basement had changed. It was growing colder and darker.

“Cyclone is Ulithi, as we guessed. Task Force 54 sailed from there to conduct a preliminary bombardment of Iwo Jima between the sixteenth and eighteenth of February. The battleship Tennessee was damaged in the action.”

Lake’s mind was racing one lap ahead. “So Forest is Iwo Jima!”

Harmon doused that with one word. “No.” She was looking down at the piece of paper in front of her.

“Well?” Lake finally insisted.

-“Task Force 54 sailed from Forest before arriving at Cyclone or Ulithi. Forest is the Japanese navy code word for San Francisco.”

San Francisco. Kuzumi was not surprised at the piece of paper Nakanga had carried in from the intelligence section. It had not taken them long to go back and dig up the code words.

It made sense. San Francisco was the most important port on the American west coast. Most of the war supplies and ships that were thrown into the war against Japan flowed out of the Golden Gate in 1945. But there were other very important factors to be considered when looking at that city.

San Francisco from April through June of 1945 had been host to the inaugural meeting of the United Nations. If Japan wanted to strike back at the world that was bearing down on the Empire, there was no more symbolic target than San Francisco. Even by late August there still were representatives from almost every country other than the Axis powers present in San Francisco working under the fledgling auspices of the UN to develop a new world order.

Nira had to have known. That was the first thought that popped into Kuzumi’s head. Was that why she killed herself? When the mission failed, as it obviously did? With her husband declared dead, her child killed in the blast at Hiroshima, and the final mission of the Genzai Bakudan a failure, had she finally given up? Kuzumi thought about it for a few moments and decided it was most likely what had happened. It was what he would have done. He silently mouthed a prayer to the Sun Goddess for his dead lover and his dead son.

And why had Genzai Bakudan failed? Even though he now knew I-24’s final destination, he still didn’t know where I-24’s journey to that final destination had been interrupted Where did the ship and the bomb rest? Kuzumi could still see the second bomb as clearly as if it were yesterday.

Unlike the American bombs, the Genzai Bakudan had been rectangular shaped. Having decided that they could never make one light enough and small enough to be carried by an airplane, the engineers under Kuzumi’s direction had seen no need to develop it with a traditional bomb shape. The rectangle had worked best. It had been over eight feet long by five on each side. They had waterproofed the second one and set it for remote detonation using a radio controller on a specific frequency and amplitude. It had weighed in at over eight thousand pounds when completed.

They had packed enough batteries around the detonator that— Kuzumi stiffened in his chair. They had packed enough batteries that if the submarine was resting on the ocean floor in cold water, there still might be enough juice left for the detonator to fire.

But could it still work after all these years? Would the uranium have decayed past the functional point? Would the metal case have sprung a leak? His scientific training answered each question as it came up. Kuzumi knew the bomb would still be functional unless-He thought about the journey the ship had taken. Most likely the bomb would be sitting in such deep water that the entire casing had been crushed by water pressure. The Pacific was the deepest ocean in the world, and if the journey had been interrupted anywhere between Hungnam and San Francisco it would be lost forever. That is what he had been told had happened to the 1-24.

Yes, Kuzumi decided, the Koreans were fishing and their quarry was buried beyond the current capability of any present technology to recover even if it was found.

But then why did he feel so uneasy?