From the Fatherland, with Love, page 55
“If we target the four floors from the fifth floor up, and there are forty columns on each floor, here’s how many we have to hit: all forty columns on the fifth floor, twenty on the sixth floor—just the ones on the side you want the building to fall toward—and on the seventh and eighth only the ones along the wall on that side, say ten columns each. That’s a total of eighty columns, each of which has to be cut completely through from all four sides, both at top and bottom, which means eight LSCs per column. Eighty times eight is… We need to make six hundred and forty linear shaped charges. If we estimate the width of the steel plate to be twelve hundred millimeters, with a thickness of thirty millimeters, we’ll need about five hundred grams of explosive for each LSC. Six hundred and forty times 0.5 is, what, three hundred and twenty kilos? How many twenty-five-kilo boxes of RDX did we have?” Fourteen, Fukuda told him. “That should do it, then,” Takeguchi said, and climbed to his feet. “It’s all right,” he reported, beaming like a boy scout. “We can bring down that hotel.” The Living echoed with cheers again, but Ishihara raised both hands to quell the premature celebration. Stroking his stubbly cheek with the barrel of the Colt Government, he stretched up in his seat to peer out the window. It was past two in the morning, but construction continued on the temporary Koryo barracks at the Odo danchi. You could see the lights of vehicles and the sparks of welders. The Koryos had every intention of finishing construction by the time their reinforcements arrived.
“Two questions,” Ishihara said. “First, how do we go about setting the LSCs inside the hotel when the Koryos themselves are using it for their command center? And second, would knocking down the hotel really kill them all?” He stood up and called Ando over to stand at one corner of the carpet. He then had Toyohara and Okubo sit about a meter down either edge, so that they and Ando formed an equilateral triangle, and turned Ando to face Toyohara. “An-an is the hotel, Toyo-toyo is the Dome, and Kubo-kubo is the hospital,” he said, pointing at each of them in turn with the gun. “The enemy is camped out in the middle here. In order to flatten them all, we need the hotel to fall diagonally, like this.” He pushed on Ando’s left shoulder, making him tilt toward Okubo. “But that’s not really possible, right?”
“You bring down a building the same way you chop down a tree,” Takeguchi said, stepping forward and bending over to make a diagonal cutting motion at Ando’s shins. “You cut all the columns on the fifth floor, half as many on the sixth floor—just the ones on the collapsing side—and a quarter as many on the seventh and eighth floors. To visualize it, think of an axe cutting into a tree.” Ishihara nodded. “A notch in the building like Pac-Man’s mouth, right? But my question is, the way you describe the cuts, wouldn’t the hotel fall toward the Dome, miss most of the Koryos’ camp, and fail to squash them all as flat as pancakes?”
Takeguchi and Fukuda exchanged wry smiles. Fukuda was acting as the assistant during this presentation. He knew all about DIY bombs made with household materials but deferred to Takeguchi when it came to high explosives. Shaking his head with some exasperation now, he walked over to the entrance, lifted one of the large wooden palettes there, dragged it back, and stood it on end in front of everyone. The palette was a rectangle about twice the size of a tatami mat, and it blocked Fukuda completely from view. No one had any idea what he was doing, and when Ishihara said, “What’s up, Fuku? You gonna strain the river for floaters?” he didn’t reply but gave the palette a nudge and let it fall forward. It toppled like a tree and slammed against the concrete floor with a terrific bang. A cloud of dust flew up, and those sitting closest coughed and spat and rubbed their eyes. “What the hell are you doing?” Yamada demanded, slapping the dust off his beige jacket with both hands.
Takeguchi stood next to the fallen palette with a small notebook. “This palette is 1.3 meters across and two meters long, thickness about ten centimeters, and it weighs less than ten kilograms. The Sea Hawk Hotel, according to my estimate, is about a hundred meters across, a hundred forty-five tall, and twenty-four deep, with a total volume of about three hundred and fifty thousand cubic meters and a total weight of about two hundred million kilograms, or two hundred thousand metric tons. The explosion of the charges themselves, at a radius of twenty-five meters, will produce a force of some twelve to twenty thousand kilograms per square meter. At fifty meters it’s six to eight thousand, and at a hundred meters still two to three thousand. Three thousand kilograms per square meter is enough to break window frames and storm shutters. At eight thousand your eardrums are in danger of bursting and the pillars of wooden houses can give way, and at twenty thousand, people would be blown out of their shoes and wooden houses would be reduced to kindling—that’s the power of three hundred and twenty kilograms of RDX.
“Next, let’s discuss the seismic effects of the hotel collapsing.” Takeguchi turned to a new page in his notebook. “According to my calculations, it will take about six seconds for the building to collapse completely. At a radius of a hundred meters, it will register from a hundred to a hundred and twenty decibels, which translates to a seven on the Japan Meteorological Agency’s seismic-intensity scale, meaning it’ll flatten virtually all wooden structures and cause buildings of reinforced concrete to break apart or list to one side. And then there’s the wind pressure. In the direction opposite the collapse it will be about seventy kilos, and in the direction of the collapse two hundred and eighty. A wind pressure of seventy works out to an instantaneous wind speed, which is what the JMA use for typhoons, of ninety meters a second. No typhoon in Japan has ever recorded a wind speed of ninety meters. Even the biggest trees would be uprooted, and it would be impossible for a person to stay on his feet. For two hundred and eighty kilos the instantaneous wind speed is two hundred fifty meters per second. I have no idea what would happen to people and buildings in winds like that, and there’s no data.”
Takeguchi spoke in a detached, indifferent way, referring constantly to his notes. “That’s mind-blowing,” Tateno whispered, but all the talk about seismic intensity and typhoons still only added up to numbers for Shinohara—he couldn’t grasp the actual forces involved. As Takeguchi was concluding his remarks, however, he threw in a couple of facts that made everyone’s jaw drop. “Rubble would fly from the point of the collapse to a radius of about two hundred meters. We’re talking clumps of concrete traveling at the unbelievable speed of a hundred to three hundred meters per second. A dense cloud of dust would billow out, also to about two hundred meters, and if you were in that cloud you wouldn’t be doing any more breathing. So what I’m trying to say is, we’re not going to flatten anybody much under the hotel itself. But you need to understand that unless you’re an alien or something, if you’re within a radius of two hundred meters of the collapse, it might be from the force of the blast or the seismic activity or the flying rubble or the dust, but you’re going down.”
Shinohara thought he could make out the faint sound of waves through the soaring glass walls. Someone had said that heavy rain was expected tonight, but it hadn’t yet begun to fall. The fan-like leaves of a traveler’s palm drooped over his head. The leaves were paler and thinner than those of the same palms in real rainforests, because the soil and air here were artificially treated and controlled. There was no draft because of the glass, and all the plants—the screw pines, the Chinese banyans, the weeping figs—stood there like sculptures, never waving or rustling. Colorful feathers littered the ground; the parrots had already been dead in their cages and beginning to decompose when Shinohara and Tateno arrived here. He got a bottle of Volvic water from his backpack and took a sip. In the past twenty-four hours he’d had nothing but some water and Calorie Mate bars, but he was much too on edge to feel hungry. Takeguchi had emphasized that they were all going to have to work hard tonight and that each of them should get plenty of food and rest. Shinohara was running on adrenaline, however.
It had been one thing to decide to demolish the hotel with LSCs, but how were they to make that happen? They had no strategy for getting the charges in place, and no one had any ideas. They had exhausted all their energy on Takei’s funeral, and by the time Takeguchi finished explaining how the devices worked, Ishihara was nodding off in his rocking chair. Each time Kaneshiro nudged him back to consciousness, he would command Tateno or Toyohara or someone to bring him some more refreshment. He was drinking tequila. He would lick some salt, bite a slice of lime, throw back a shot, then gasp and stare at nothing with glistening eyes. Okubo suggested they postpone the meeting till tomorrow, but there was no time—once the Koryo reinforcements arrived, it wouldn’t matter if the hotel got knocked down or not. Takeguchi said it would take two days to manufacture six hundred and forty LSCs, provided he could get ten volunteers to help him in the lab in Building E. Once they’d smuggled the charges inside the hotel, it would take seven to eight minutes to attach each one. Taping them to the columns would be easy enough, but first they’d have to strip away the decorative fabric or marble or wood veneers, and that could be time-consuming. He estimated they would need eleven hours to set all the charges. The question now was, how could they arrange for the Koryos to be elsewhere during all that time?
Shinohara’s building mates Yamada, Mori, and Hino came up with the idea of releasing his frogs in the hotel. The frogs, they proposed, could be used to kill all the Koryos inside, after which they’d be able go in and set the charges. Kaneshiro had endorsed this plan, saying, “Those beasties of yours are more poisonous even than cobras, right?” Shinohara told them that dart frogs lose their toxicity when bred and raised by humans, but since the others clearly suspected him of just trying to protect his precious pets, he explained at some length. “The standard they use to measure toxicity is called the LD50, or medium lethal dose,” he said. “The LD50 for potassium cyanide, taken orally, is ten milligrams per kilogram of body weight, so for a man of sixty kilograms the lethal dose would be 0.6 grams. The strongest poison in the world is made by the bacteria that cause botulism. It’s approximately ten million times as potent as potassium cyanide: one gram of botulinum toxin is enough to kill seventeen million people. Dart frogs can’t match that, but the venom of the most poisonous one is about five thousand times as strong as potassium cyanide, about two hundred and fifty times the venom of a cobra, about two hundred times sarin, fifty times sea-snake venom, eight times VX nerve gas, and five times stronger than blowfish poison.
“However. No one knows why exactly, but once the frogs are removed from their natural habitats—the jungles of Central and South America—they stop producing poison.” Shinohara’s eyes went unfocused as he spoke. He was picturing the frogs’ homelands. He could call up vivid scenes from those rainforests wherever he was or whatever he was doing, not because he’d been there—he hadn’t—but because he had envisioned them thousands of times. The home of a given frog, whether in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Guyana, or Suriname, would be at the misty foot of some mountain range, where the air was heavy with moisture, and vegetation and trees grew thick in the humus soil—a paradise ruled by wild animals, birds arrayed in gaudy colors, and yet-undiscovered insects and bacteria. He could see water dripping from the tips of drooping leaves, a network of streams whispering over the mosscovered earth, and wild orchids blooming in every cranny. Tears welled up whenever he thought of the frogs’ homelands, and his eyes were moist as he went on.
“Especially amazing is the Phyllobates terribilis, which lives where the Patia and San Juan rivers meet in south-west Colombia. Also known as the golden poison frog. One milligram of its poison can kill ten people. They come in three different color variations, or morphs: metallic mint or pale green, metallic yellow, and metallic orange. Of course, these guys too lose toxicity when taken out of their environment. There was a theory that their poison is made from the formic acid in the ants they eat, but a breeder in America imported some Costa Rican ants and raised them to feed his terribilis, and the frogs stopped producing poison anyway. I tried it too: same result. Which means the poisonous substance must be in the stuff the ants eat back home. Ants eat the meat of dead animals and insects and things, so now they think maybe bacteria are the root source of the poison, but there are so many types of bacteria that there’s no way of telling which one it might be. So in the end it remains a mystery why these frogs lose their poison away from home. Nobody really knows.
“But let me tell you about Dendrobates variabilis, which I consider the most beautiful creature on earth. It’s less than two centimeters long and can sit on your thumbnail, but its coloring is spectacular, with extreme variations depending on the angle of the light—a gradation from lime green to electric blue on the body, with legs that vary from electric silver to electric sky blue, and gunmetal black spots all over. Variabilis lives in the Huallaga River basin, at the foot of the Andes, between Tarapoto and Yurimaguas. The frogs are well protected there, because the wetlands are full of mosquitoes and gnats that carry viruses, and poisonous bugs and snakes, and the dense forests around them are home to boa constrictors and leopards. It’s a kingdom barred to human beings. The ecosystem itself protects the frogs. The habitat of the golden poison frog too is so hostile to humans that not even the Colombian special forces, the Lanceros, will set foot inside it, which is why the Popular Liberation Army is said to have its base of operations there.”
The others pricked up their ears at this last tidbit. “El Ejército Popular de Liberación?” Kaneshiro asked, enunciating carefully, and Shinohara said, “That’s right.” Kaneshiro nodded in a contented way and said, “So the guerrillas and the dart frogs are looking out for each other,” and Ishihara, his cheeks red from tequila, murmured dreamily, “Wonderful, wonderful froggies!” Shinohara cleared his throat and continued. “In fact, the habitat of variabilis was the location of one of the base camps of the Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and a few years back some foreigners went to the Huallaga River basin to collect specimens and got themselves executed.” Hearing this, Ishihara’s excitement bubbled over again, and he rose from his chair waving the Colt Government and shouting, “Sendero Luminoso—the Shining Path!” Shinohara nodded. “An American pharmaceutical company once decided to catch tens of thousands of dart frogs, hoping to manufacture a new painkiller from the batrachotoxin they carry, but the plan fell through because of the guerrillas. Big drug companies can only catch frogs in Costa Rica and Panama, places like that, where it’s not as dangerous.”
“Well, we couldn’t very well turn such precious creatures into weapons anyway,” Ishihara said, and the others nodded in agreement. No way. It wouldn’t be right. But how cool is Sendero Luminoso? You think they ever use frogs to kill people? The discussion rolled on, providing a brief period of relative peace and comfort. But having ruled out the frogs they were back to square one, and eventually the collective mood of exhaustion and anxiety reasserted itself. Kaneshiro came up with the rash suggestion that a team blast their way in and set the explosives while another team hold off the Koryos with Takei’s weapons, but Ishihara quickly vetoed that, saying if he wanted to commit suicide he should do it alone. Everyone understood the strength of the enemy. In Daimyo 1-Chome a soldier with the Koryo Special Police had put two successive bullets into the head of his target, and it was said that a Koryo officer who’d been held hostage in Ohori Park, though suffering severe burns over his face and upper body, had punctured an SAT man’s throat with a karate blow. You couldn’t go head to head with people like that. “They’re human beings too, though,” Ishihara had said after a while. “There must be something they can’t deal with, some point of vulnerability. Scour your skullcheese and skinflutes and figure out what that might be.”
This artificial jungle had nothing remotely resembling the beauty represented by poison-dart frogs, Shinohara was thinking as he got up to pee in the shadow of the traveler’s palm. He pointed the flow down the trunk of the tree to minimize noise. He was just contemplating whether to take a pre-emptive dump as well when the cellphone vibrated in his vest pocket. It was Takeguchi checking in. “All clear here,” Shinohara reported, and Takeguchi said, “We start right on time, then, at one o’clock sharp,” and clicked off. Not wanting to shit too near his own nest, Shinohara went behind one of the birdcages. There were four of these, surrounded by dragon trees, long-leafed figs, screw pines, giant upright elephant ears, and other exotic plants. The Koryos had cut the water supply, and some of the plants were already withering. But the way Shinohara saw it, simply putting them in this artificial environment was equivalent to gradually killing them anyway. The ground was laid with tile and brick for the convenience of visitors, confining the plants to limited areas. What little earth they had was covered thickly with white sand and polished pebbles to deter bacteria and insects. The plants consumed nutrients produced not by bacteria but chemical fertilizers and were sprayed regularly with insecticides.
They’d been brought from their native habitats to a completely different environment to be exploited, abused, and slowly murdered. It’s like the assholes who raise reptiles, Shinohara was thinking as he lowered his pants. He kept dart frogs and arthropods but drew the line at reptiles. He was intrigued by the black mamba, which was said to be the world’s most poisonous and aggressive snake, but he’d never kept a reptile and never intended to. In elementary school he had lived near a pet shop, and he’d often gone there to look at the tropical fish and tarantulas and scorpions and things. They had a lot of reptiles for sale too. Owning pets had become something of a fad, and many people who lived in small condos and apartments where you couldn’t keep a cat or dog were raising lizards and tortoises. Certain species of tortoise with interesting designs on their shells had been so in demand on the Japanese market that they nearly became extinct. Shinohara bought scorpions and spiders at the shop, but it made his heart bleed to see an Egyptian tortoise in a case lined with sawdust, ramming its head against the glass wall again and again, or a big lizard like a tegu in a case so small it couldn’t even turn around. But there were always people ogling the imprisoned turtles, snakes, lizards, and chameleons, and squealing about how cute they were.
