From the Fatherland, with Love, page 54
But then he remembered that Takahashi hadn’t had any direct contact with the KEF. It had taken Kuroda himself a few moments to grasp what he’d been told in the car earlier. These days you only ever heard the word “execution” in the movies or manga. And it was doubly hard to imagine it taking place before a great crowd standing in rows as if they were at morning assembly or an award ceremony. “Look,” he said quietly. “There are two stakes set up in the clearing, with sandbags piled up behind them. They’re about to shoot two of their own people.” Takahashi went back to the balcony to check. In front of the serried ranks of soldiers were indeed two posts of slightly different heights, each within an arc of sandbags. Their purpose, once the image of people tied to them came into focus, was unmistakable. Takahashi’s face turned pale. He was a good doctor, said to be the top man in Kyushu for treating tuberculosis with chemotherapy, but he seemed at a complete loss now.
Kuroda called Tsuchiya over and explained the circumstances to him. Tsuchiya listened wide-eyed and shocked, but when Kuroda said that they shouldn’t let the patients watch it, he immediately saw what needed to be done, and rushed off, saying he’d get hold of the nursing manager. Next Kuroda took out his cellphone and called Koshida, the head of security. He could sense the jolt it gave him when he mentioned the word “execution.” He explained, “I want you to take urgent measures to prevent the patients from seeing what goes on. Especially those on the North Wing, and the West Wing maternity and pediatrics wards—we definitely don’t want any expecting mothers seeing it. There aren’t any patients here, on the second-floor balcony, right now.” Takahashi seemed to have finally grasped the situation and, still white-faced, was about to say something, but Kuroda held up a hand to stop him. “Even if we get all the guards together,” Koshida was saying on the phone, “there aren’t enough to cover the whole North Wing. Maybe we could announce it over the PA system.”
But how would they word it? If they told people not to look, it would just arouse their curiosity. There were about twenty rooms on each of the six inpatient floors of the North Wing. Around eighty of them were for seriously ill people confined to bed and unable to get up without assistance, which left around forty other rooms. “Dr. Tsuchiya’s already gone to the North Wing, so why don’t you check up on maternity and pediatrics?” he told Koshida, and hung up. “Shall I call the other doctors?” asked Takahashi, but Kuroda thought it would be better to dispatch nurses to the wards. The sick were sensitive, and it might well alarm them to have doctors other than their regular consultants barging in. A call came from Tsuchiya’s cellphone. “I’ve already talked to staff on the fifth floor, and I’m on my way to the sixth. Can you deal with the seventh?” Kuroda asked Takahashi to take the top two floors, nine and ten, and the pair of them headed for the elevator at a run.
The rain had eased up, and the pointed tip of the Sea Hawk Hotel was now shrouded in a low white cloud. A helicopter still circled overhead. The assembled troops stood waiting, their uniforms dripping wet. Seen from this distance, the two stakes looked the size of matchsticks. It was a bit like watching a game from the top row of the outfield bleachers in Fukuoka Dome. With Kuroda on the balcony were Tsuchiya and Takahashi, and another seven or eight doctors from dermatology, plastic surgery, and pediatric surgery. Several outpatient nurses and auxiliary nurses had also been there but had left after being told what was about to happen. Kuroda had no desire to see someone shot by a firing squad either. Yet even if he went back to the consulting room, short of packing his ears with cotton wool and pressing his hands over them, he would still hear the shots. And the sound alone would paint the picture in his imagination, and might be even harder to forget. “Are they really going to kill their own soldiers?” muttered Tsuchiya. Yes, and without even batting an eye, Kuroda thought but didn’t say. Takahashi was taking deep breaths and swallowing repeatedly.
A group of officers, four women among them, came out of the hotel and exchanged salutes with those on parade. The officers then formed two rows on either side of the stakes, where they would have an unobstructed view of the proceedings. And then two men, their hands tied behind their backs, emerged from the large tent. Barefoot and stooped over, heads drooping, they were marched toward the stakes. They had been stripped of their uniforms and were in simple white T-shirts and gray pants. Each was flanked by two armed soldiers. “Sorry, I can’t take this,” Takahashi said, and left the balcony. Four of the dermatologists and pediatric surgeons joined him, shaking their heads. The condemned men reached the stakes. One pair of soldiers in gray uniforms untied their hands, then retied them behind the posts.
Kuroda glanced sideways at Tsuchiya and noticed that his eyes were brimming with tears. He remembered a movie in which a Jewish woman in a concentration camp was shot for just speaking up. She hadn’t even been protesting. Just as the Nazis had done, the KEF violently stripped their detainees of everything they owned and then held them in submission by exploiting their natural instinct to survive. What would he do if any of his family were among those prisoners? That woman whose wrinkled breasts he’d glimpsed through the gap in her gown—what if she’d been his wife, or his mother? Surely he couldn’t have kept quiet then? But what could he have done? Physical resistance would just have resulted in a vicious beating. He didn’t know how to protest because he’d never before been in the position of being controlled by the threat of violence. But he had to keep thinking of a way, if he wanted to overcome the rage and impotence he felt.
The condemned men had been secured to the posts at the chest and waist, and were now being bound around the thighs. Eight soldiers with rifles lined up side by side facing them, several meters away. Kuroda had just decided he had to watch this execution through, however hard it was, when his cellphone suddenly rang. It was Koshida, from security. He’d just returned to the guardroom by the main entrance, he said, when Dr. Seragi rushed past him, heading for the clearing in the camp. Kuroda felt goosebumps rise on his arms. “Stop him!” he yelled, but Koshida yelled back: “I already tried!” Tsuchiya, who had heard this exchange, pointed outside. They could see a figure in a white coat passing through a gap in the hedge between the hospital grounds and the park. He must have rushed out the moment he’d heard about the execution. Dodging between see-saws and slides, he ran on, still wearing his hospital slippers.
Kuroda stood rooted to the spot in horror. Tsuchiya grabbed the cellphone out of his hand and shouted at Koshida: “Go stop him! We’re on our way.” Koshida started to say something back, but Tsuchiya cut the line and took Kuroda by the arm: “Let’s go.” But Kuroda couldn’t move. His body simply wouldn’t do what it was told. He didn’t have the strength to face those people again. “Come on!” Tsuchiya tugged at his arm. You don’t know what they’re like, Kuroda thought. Tsuchiya gave him a last, baffled look, then ran for the elevator.
His white coat now splattered with mud, Seragi was nearing the killing ground. Koshida and another guard could be seen chasing after him, followed at some distance by Tsuchiya and several other doctors. Kuroda looked out over the park, the scene going in and out of focus with his own reflection in the rain-spattered glass. His mind was blank. He heard a voice inside him asking if it was okay to do nothing. His legs seemed to stir, but as soon as he tried to move it was as if a transparent barrier came down to block his way, and his nostrils filled with the stench of the detention center.
When Seragi reached the rear line of soldiers, he stopped running. He paused briefly, then started walking slowly through the narrow gap between the orderly rows of uniforms. His white coat stood out starkly against the khaki. The troops must have noticed him, though none of them moved a muscle. They were probably forbidden to break ranks, but they must have been startled at the sudden appearance of this old man all in white. Koshida and Tsuchiya, rather than squeezing between the rows, began to make their way around them. The two condemned men were now lashed securely to the posts. A gray-uniformed officer barked out an order, and the firing squad checked the breeches of their guns. When the line of eight marksmen raised their rifles, Seragi again broke into a run, cupping his hands around his mouth like a megaphone and shouting something. It was unclear what he was saying, but his voice was faintly audible even from where Kuroda stood.
One of the officers took a step forward and gave an order. Four soldiers moved to block Seragi, then surrounded him, hiding him from view. He tried to slip between them, only to be held back, with two of them taking an arm on either side and the other two grabbing his legs and lifting him off the ground. One of his slippers fell off. Tsuchiya, Koshida, and the others were stopped by several officers running toward them, weapons out, and raised their arms in surrender. Seragi was dragged over to them, passing in front of the four women officers. The old man yelled something at the top of his voice, but Kuroda couldn’t tell if it was in Korean or Japanese.
The soldiers let go, and Seragi fell backwards, landing on his buttocks. An officer aimed his revolver at Seragi’s head, but another—the one who appeared regularly on NHK Fukuoka—restrained him. The helicopter had come lower and was now hovering overhead, probably trying to film the figure of Seragi sitting there exhausted on the ground. Tsuchiya and the others helped him up and were brushing the dirt off his white coat when there was a short series of popping sounds, like a string of firecrackers going off. The shots echoed off the surrounding buildings, and even Kuroda standing on the balcony heard them quite clearly. The men tied to the posts jerked and slumped forward. The gray-uniformed officer moved quickly toward them and shot each man in the back of the head with his revolver. Kuroda watched as parts of their heads spattered around them. The officer stood rigidly at attention, then looked up at the sky and shouted something, whereupon all the troops saluted. And then, just like that, everyone dispersed. Tsuchiya and the others were making their way back, half carrying Seragi between them. At some point he stopped, wrenched himself out of their grip, and, removing his one remaining slipper, walked on, holding it in his hand. The two corpses were cut down, laid on wide wooden planks, and carried into the large tent. Kuroda left the balcony, telling himself he must try to wipe this scene from his mind.
9
BON VOYAGE
April 10, 2011
SHINOHARA SAT CONCEALED in the undergrowth of the artificial jungle. The second hand of his watch ticked forward, and the date changed. It was midnight, the morning of the tenth, twenty-four hours since they’d slipped into the hotel. The only illumination was from the emergency-exit signs, and when he raised his head he could see dark Hakata Bay outside the glass walls. Tateno lay snoring softly nearby, amid a clump of tropical trees. He was wrapped in a green wedding dress he’d taken from a place in the adjoining shopping arcade that sold and rented formalwear. Shinohara looked up. The enclosure was shaped like a giant snail’s shell, and the ceiling and all the walls were glass criss-crossed with a steel framework. Tateno awoke in his niche between the trees and looked around. He was wearing a black sweatshirt, black trousers, and black sneakers beneath his wedding-dress wrapping. “Why’re you awake?” he whispered. “Not sleepy,” said Shinohara, “but you go ahead.” He showed him his watch. “Still an hour left?” Tateno muttered, and closed his eyes again.
Their strategy had been devised the night of Takei’s burial at sea. Takeguchi’s proposal for bringing down the Sea Hawk Hotel with special explosives had been so off-the-wall that at first no one took him seriously. “You’ve seen big demolitions on TV, where they make buildings implode, right?” he’d asked the group. “Well, how do you think they do it? They collapse the columns that hold the buildings up.”
He displayed a kind of metal pipe with an odd profile, like an inverted M. “This is called a linear shaped charge, or LSC,” he said. “You pack the interior with high explosives, and when they’re detonated the pipe melts and bends, and the tip of this V narrows to a point and expels a jet of molten metal that travels at thousands of meters per second and can cut through anything in an instant. Attach these to the columns and set them off simultaneously, and you can bring down even the biggest, sturdiest building. But that’s not all. By configuring the cuts properly you can actually make the building topple over, not just collapse in its own footprint. And you can decide which way you want it to fall.”
The room had erupted in cheers, and even Shinohara had been impressed, though far from convinced. It was exciting to talk about bringing down a high-rise building, but it didn’t seem realistic. The others too, after cheering, were now looking at Takeguchi with No, but seriously expressions. He smiled and said, “The problem with you all is, you got no schoolin’. You probably don’t know anything about tank artillery either. Well, tanks nowadays are mounted with two types of guns. One fires normal rounds, for use against enemy troops, and the other shoots armor-piercing rounds. If you fire a normal round at a tank, it explodes on contact with the steel armor and doesn’t do any harm to personnel. But armor-piercing rounds work on the same principle as this linear shaped charge. They have a V-shaped liner in the tip that’s packed with a high explosive, and the instant the tip hits the tank it creates a metal jet that rips a hole in the armor, and the round proceeds into the interior before exploding and killing everyone inside.”
“So why don’t ordinary people know about these LSCs?” Kaneshiro had said. “I mean people who aren’t bomb geeks? None of us have ever even heard of them before.”
“Idiot!” Ishihara pointed an accusing finger at him from his rocking chair in the center of the Living. “So! You’re not just a dinkydink who likes killing people but a dingalingdong who wouldn’t know a blue alien babe from a dog licking your balls!” Takeguchi opened his mouth to speak, but Ishihara silenced him with a raised hand. Waving the Colt Government in the other and wriggling all over, he shouted: “Why is this stuff kept secret? You’d all better scour your brains and foreskins and bumfringe till you have the answer!” It was the gun Takei had been shot with and was still splattered with his blood but no longer loaded. “Ishihara-san, watch where you’re pointing that thing,” Kaneshiro said, making a face and leaning from side to side to avoid looking down the barrel. “Shut up,” Ishihara said. “Don’t be getting all uppity! Pushing out your lips like a disgruntled goldfish…” He swung the gun in an even wider arc, and Matsuyama, as if prompted by this sweeping gesture, raised his hand and said, “I know! Maybe they’ve tried to keep it quiet so terrorists wouldn’t use it.”
This answer seemed to satisfy everyone. Takeguchi said that professional demolitionists had stopped talking publicly about these devices long ago. Linear shaped charges were at the core of a conspiracy theory which held that the Bush administration had itself orchestrated the terrorist attacks in New York City during his presidency. Even Shinohara, as a small child, had thought it odd that those buildings should collapse like that just because planes had crashed into them. Some time after the second crash, the World Trade Center towers had dropped as if sliced in half. It all made more sense if you assumed that LSCs had been put in place and then set off by remote control.
But according to Takeguchi that scenario wasn’t credible. It would be a massive undertaking to set LSCs in buildings of that size. The collapse had begun from the middle floors, and to set the charges on multiple floors in each of the Twin Towers, where tens of thousands of people were working day and night—it couldn’t have been done, he said. “What about us, then?” said Ando. “That hotel isn’t exactly small either.” Fukuda handed Takeguchi a letter-size sheet of paper with a photograph of the Sea Hawk Hotel. Takeguchi stared at it and sighed. “No, it isn’t, is it. And I don’t know anything about architecture, so I’ve no idea how many columns there are, or where they’re positioned.”
Hino had then inserted his stone-bodhisattva face and peered at the photo. “When was this built?” he said. “It was already here when I came to Fukuoka,” skull-faced Okubo told him, and Ando and the five Satanists nodded. “You’re a Kyushu boy, right?” Sato said to Toyohara, who replied, “Pop-Pop, he told me that that hotel was there as long as he could remember, which means like the Taisho era or Meiji era or the Warring States period, I guess.” Everyone had been particularly solicitous toward Toyohara since his accidental shooting of Takei, and now Fukuda patted his shaved head and said, “Very good.” Felix got on the Internet and discovered that the hotel had been completed in the spring of 1995. “In that case, from the middle floors up it’ll be steel frame,” Hino said, “and for the lower floors a mixture of that and reinforced concrete.” Lightweight steel frames had been developed in the early Nineties or so, he said, and had been used almost exclusively in high-rises ever since, being much more economical than reinforced concrete. Staring hard at the photo, he began to add up the probable columns. “One at the very front… Longitudinally through the building, ten or eleven per side… Four for the crossbeams…” He was like a middle-aged man counting the hairs in his comb. “Four around the elevator shafts, eight around the emergency stairway and service corridor… Basically, there should be about forty columns per floor.”
“Can you tell the size of the columns,” Takeguchi asked him, “or the thickness of the steel?” Hino peered even more closely at the photo, tilting his head to one side. “They’d probably be from a hundred to a hundred and twenty centimeters across, with a plate thickness of thirty millimeters or so,” he reckoned. “You’re sure they aren’t filled with concrete?” Takeguchi asked. Apparently the LSCs had too short a range to slice through concrete or thick layers of metal. Linear shaped charges displayed their power to best advantage when used on buildings with hollow steel frames or on structures like steel bridges and smokestacks. “It’s possible that the bottom four floors use reinforced concrete,” Hino said, “but I can guarantee you that the columns are hollow from the fifth floor up.” Fukuda handed another sheet of paper to Takeguchi, who pulled a calculator from his pocket and lay prone on the floor. He propped himself up on his elbows and mumbled as he made his calculations.
