From the Fatherland, with Love, page 58
“Fifteen more minutes,” Tateno said now, looking at his watch. “Never slept in a wedding dress before,” he muttered as he folded the thing up. He opened his daypack, which held some water, Calorie Mate bars, and forty boomerangs in an L-shaped leather case, and removed the case to inspect the weapons. The boomerangs were bound together at the grips in bundles of five, and the blades were protected with plastic wrapping. Shinohara had coated the edges of the blades with a paste he’d prepared by mashing together the fruit of the Japanese star anise—a tree favored by cemeteries—and sacred lily root, then adding the maxillipeds of centipedes. The berry of the star anise contains the neurotoxin anisatin, which works directly on the nerve cells, releasing a flood of the neurotransmitters that communicate excitement. This causes the muscles as well as the circulatory and respiratory organs to spasm, leading to paralysis and asphyxiation. The sacred lily root contains a component called rhodein, which also causes convulsions and paralysis.
“I wonder what Ishihara-san is doing right now,” Tateno said. “It’s hard to believe it’s been only about twenty-four hours since we left.” A picture of Ishihara’s clock-stopping face loomed in Shinohara’s mind.
It had taken two entire days to prepare for the operation. Shinohara had readied plastic sacks that would hold the flies and other live weapons, and separately packed up some extra culture medium for which he had a special plan. Tateno had gone to the lab in Building E, where he joined the team that ended up making four hundred LSCs the first day. Hino did a thorough check of his hand-held tools—electric cutters and breaker hammers, portable welding and cutting equipment, tanks of acetylene and oxygen. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely as he lined the tools up in the hallway. “I always thought I’d use these to build a building,” he said. “Not to bring one down.” Okubo, Miyazaki, and Shibata set out to buy supplies and returned with nineteen oversized mountaineer’s backpacks and ten smaller daypacks. The daypacks were for things that needed to be handled with special care, like Hino’s tools, the hand grenades, the electric detonators, and the exploder.
Yamada and Mori had spent the entire two days helping make LSCs, stopping only for meals. It was a simple operation. They used a mechanical press to fold lead plates into the inverted M shape, then filled them with a gelatinous mixture of high explosives. “It’s like spreading crusty old mustard or ketchup on a hotdog,” Yamada said with a big smile. In addition to gathering and checking his tools and carrying them to Building C, Hino had studied the sketch of the Sea Hawk Hotel and managed to locate the central control room and the air-conditioning machine rooms. According to him, all air-conditioning and ventilation machinery used to be in the basements of high-rise buildings because they took up so much space and created so much vibration. But as the size of the machinery was drastically reduced over the years, builders began placing a number of independent machine rooms in high-rises—one on a low floor, one or more on the middle floors, and one near the top. This was more efficient than putting in ductwork that went from basement to roof.
Hino had zeroed in on the sixth and seventh floors, both of which had Japanese-style rooms on one side of the hotel only and expanded service corridors on the other. The air-conditioning machinery for the lower floors would be on the sixth, he was sure, and for the middle floors on the seventh. There would be another machine room higher up, but it wasn’t necessary to find that one. All they needed access to was the stuff that regulated the air on the lower floors. The Koryos were using the main banquet hall, on the third floor, as their command center. Hino said that a room as large as that would have its own dedicated ventilation ductwork employing an enormous fan. It was his idea to release the flies directly into the duct that fed that fan.
The preparations had finally been completed on the night of the second day. What delayed them in the end was Shinohara’s packing of the bugs. He had to wait till the last minute, so that they wouldn’t use up all the oxygen in the vinyl bags. After making sure he’d set aside enough flies to feed his frogs for three days, he headed for Building C, where everyone was to gather. He put the plastic bags containing the insects into two hundred-liter-capacity backpacks that he and Tateno were to carry. These weighed almost nothing, so they would also carry daypacks with Hino’s spare acetylene and oxygen tanks.
They had decided not to bring any weapons they were unlikely to use. That included all the sniper rifles. The only automatic weapons they took were the M16, the AK-74, and the sub-machine guns—the Uzi and the Scorpion. They also packed the FN and the Beretta, whose ammo was interchangeable. All of these weapons fitted into a couple of the large backpacks with room to spare, so they threw in the short-barreled shotgun and grenade launcher as well. The remaining fifteen backpacks were filled with LSCs, wiring, and the styrofoam they’d use when attaching the charges to the columns. Fukuda put the exploder and the remote-control apparatus in a daypack, which he carried cradled in his arms. On his back was a second daypack containing Felix’s laptop and electronic jamming device, the late Takei’s night-vision goggles and thermographic scope, and Hino’s electric tools.
In the shadows between Buildings C and D, waiting for midnight, were five cars and three motorcycles driven by members of the Speed Tribe. Shinohara and the others were wearing black or dark-blue shirts or sweatshirts and black, rubber-soled sneakers, but the Tribe had prepared uniforms for them to wear over these—white tunics, like elongated happi coats, emblazoned on the back with the pagoda symbol the Koryos used. The trunks of the cars popped open to receive the large backpacks, and three team members jumped in each car, all holding daypacks. Shinohara, Hino, and Tateno, who were going to carry their bags to the air-conditioning machine room, would ride on the pillion seats of the bikes, so that they could spring instantly into action. Shinohara and Hino were told to climb on behind the Chief and bean-jam Koizumi, respectively, and Tateno jumped on behind another deputy, a guy who wore his long hair in a samurai-style chonmage. Hino’s daypack held several gas cylinders for his cutting torch. He would use the torch to cut out the locks on any doors they needed to get through.
Toyohara had arrived a little late. Kaneshiro tried to get him to change out of his usual Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals, but the Chief said there was no need for that—it was exactly the sort of outfit an off-duty Speed Triber might wear. Toyohara was also wearing a headband with something written in Hangul, and he had a short sword wrapped in cloth and strapped to his back. The sword became an issue, but Toyohara wouldn’t be denied. He insisted he was fighting for Pop-Pop as well, and the others decided to let it go. There was something surreal about the figure he cut in his muumuu-like black shirt with its skulls-and-dragons motif, his shorts, his tattered leather sandals, and the samurai sword.
Perched atop the Chief’s pompadour was a khaki DPRK People’s Army cap, complete with an embroidered red star and a chin strap. He’d found it in a boutique in Tenjin. The two deputies wore headbands saying KORYO EXPEDITIONARY FORCE in both kanji and Hangul. Ishihara tried to get into one of the cars, but Kaneshiro stopped him. “Ishihara-san, please stay here and hold down the fort.” Takeguchi and Ando nodded their agreement, as did Orihara and Okubo. Everyone was focused on this exchange. “Ya think?” Ishihara said, rolling his eyes this way and that. “Well, I and I am almost fifty, and still feeling the tequila from last night, and the old ears are ringing like fire alarms, so… Maybe I and I would just be in the way.”
“It isn’t that,” Kaneshiro said, standing at attention. He had one of the daypacks reversed so that it hung against his chest. “All of us are really grateful to you for looking out for us all this time. Please stay behind and write a book about us. It doesn’t matter if it gets published or not, but just tell our story. Will you do that?” Ishihara scratched his head in an embarrassed way and said, “We’re not big on prose. Let’s make it a poem, okay?” He looked around at everybody. “All right, then. Bon voyage. Or, as they say in English: Habu a naisu torippu!”
The cars and motorcycles departed one by one, moving slowly and quietly. All the vehicles had their mufflers hooked up. Just down the road, at the Odo danchi, construction was in progress on the barracks, and the thunder of unsilenced engines would only have drawn unwanted attention. They weren’t likely to be attacked on the way, but if the convoy got stopped by the police and searched, it’d be all over. “Once we get closer,” the Chief said to Shinohara, who was hanging on tight behind him, “we’ll disconnect the mufflers and blast off.” The Chief’s ride was a vintage model. When Shinohara complimented him on it, he said, “You won’t find one of these in your average used-bike lot.” It was a lovingly restored 1970s Yamaha XJ-400. “I’m all right with dyin’,” he said. “But I wouldn’t ever want to wreck this thing.”
As they were pulling away from Building C, Shinohara had turned to look back. Ishihara stood between C and D, quietly waving. It was too dark and too far to make out the expression on his face, but Shinohara imagined it to be his usual sleepy look. He was still badly hung-over and probably just waiting for them to move out of sight before hurrying to bed. No one who got sentimental in this sort of situation would have joined the group in the first place. Tearful farewells, endless love, unquestioning trust—all such things, Ishihara had taught them, were lies. He’d tried to climb into a car, but had he really meant to participate in the operation? Shinohara had once heard him say that he didn’t mind dying but was scared to death of fear and pain.
Kaneshiro wanted Ishihara to write about them—did that mean he expected to die? They’d devised a detailed plan for infiltrating the hotel, but no one had said much about how they were going to avoid being hoist by their own LSCs. Once the charges were all set, they hoped to escape and head for the bay, where they’d position themselves behind a breakwater and set off the explosions by remote control—this rough outline of an exit plan was all they had. No one complained, however. No one here was the sort to look before leaping. Shinohara’s take on death was similar to the Chief’s. He didn’t mind dying. He just didn’t want to leave his dart frogs crying.
It was a humid night, with a ceiling of low-hanging clouds. As they approached the gasoline station where the rest of the Tribe were waiting Shinohara heard the roar of engines, so loud that it reverberated in his guts, and saw the sweeping cones of light created by criss-crossing headlamps. The gas station and the street in front of it were jammed with cars and bikes as far as he could see. Checkpoint C was visible from here. Some of the cars were mounted with searchlights, and the entire area was lit as bright as noon. Huge banners waved from car windows and flapped at the backs of bikes—some made up like the DPRK flag, some decorated with the Koryo pagoda symbol, even some inscribed KORYO EXPEDITIONARY FORCE: FUKUOKA DIVISION. The banners were as much as four meters long. When the bike bearing Shinohara and the Chief arrived, the crowd erupted in cheers. “Must be three hundred rides here,” the Chief muttered, surveying the scene. “More than I expected.” Koizumi the bean-jam heir nodded and said, “Beautiful.” The three eastbound lanes of Yokatopia Avenue were overflowing with vehicles as far as the Jigyohama 3-Chome intersection, and the noise was terrific. Checkpoint C was on the north-west corner of the intersection, the Hawks Town Mall on the north-east.
Koryo soldiers and some locals emerged from Hawks Town to see what was going on, and the soldiers at Checkpoint C already had their machine guns pointed this way and were working their cellphones. There were only three of them, but backup could arrive at any moment. Police getting involved would be the worst possible scenario. “It’s time,” the Chief said. He disconnected his muffler and told Koizumi to give the signal. Hino was on the back of Koizumi’s bike, clinging to his pelvic bones with both hands. From either side of the engine protruded a shiny array of bugle-shaped horns. The deputy sounded two long blasts, like the shrieks of a heavy-metal singer, and the bikes and cars began maneuvering into formation.
When they were all in position, Koizumi cranked his siren again, just once. The passengers in all the cars leaned out of their windows, and the other deputy, the one with the samurai hairdo, counted off through a handheld loudspeaker—“Three, four! Koryo Weonjeonggun, mansae-e-e-e-e! Koryo Weonjeonggun, chwego-o-o-o-o! Koryo Weonjeonggun, iptae shikhyeo-juseyo!” Each time they shouted “mansae” they all raised both arms in the age-old “banzai” gesture. The bellowed chants and the howls of the horns and sirens split the night sky and echoed off the buildings. The sentries at Hawks Town and the soldiers at Checkpoint C were all looking this way wide-eyed, and Shinohara saw one of them smile. It must make even North Korean soldiers happy to hear the local citizens praising them in their own language. The Chief signaled again, Koizumi sounded his siren, and the convoy moved slowly forward until Speed Tribe vehicles filled the wide intersection.
“Koryo Weonjeonggun, mansae-e-e-e-e!” The chant went on. A taxi approaching from the direction of the special-needs school caught sight of the massive caravan, made a quick U-turn, and sped away. Koizumi got off the bike, turned slowly to face the checkpoint, silenced the mob with a blast of his siren, then picked up a loudspeaker to restart the chant. “Koryo Weonjeonggun, mansae-e-e-e-e!” he yelled, setting a slower rhythm. While that was going on, the Chief turned to Shinohara and said, “So, what happened to the media?” Ishihara’s assertion that the Koryos wouldn’t dare shoot because of the TV cameras had been nothing more than an expedient lie. “We’re going to sneak into the hotel,” Shinohara shouted into the Chief’s ear, his nose nearly touching the pomade-smelling hair as he struggled to be heard above the engine noise and chanting. “If a TV camera caught us doin’ that, and the Koryos saw it, we’d all be dead ducks,” he added, throwing in a bit of Fukuoka dialect. The biker peered up at the cloudy sky and growled, “Oh yeah?” He seemed to be having second thoughts, which made Shinohara panic a bit. If the Tribe pulled out, the operation would fall apart before it ever got started. The Chief turned to face him, a deep furrow creasing his brow, eyes wide and intense. “Hell, I’m a man,” he said. “The Chief of the Hakatakko Devils. Hang on, brother. Here we go.” He drew a whistle from his pocket and gave a long, ear-splitting shriek on it. At this, Koizumi drove slowly up to the soldiers at Checkpoint C and blasted his siren. He pointed at his own chest, then pointed to the road beyond the checkpoint—Can we pass? The soldiers made no eye contact with him but shook their heads expressionlessly.
Koizumi placed his palms together as if pleading, then shouted, “Koryo Weonjeonggun, mansae-e-e-e-e!” and gave two short squeals with his siren. At that signal, a dozen or more cars and bikes began doing a high-speed zigzag up and down the half-kilometer stretch of Yokatopia Avenue between Checkpoint B and Checkpoint D, weaving a lace-like pattern at full throttle, racing their engines, waving their banners, and sounding their klaxons and sirens. Some of the bikes popped wheelies and the modified lowriders scraped the asphalt and spat sparks. It had to be an astonishing sight for the Koryos: the sentries at Hawks Town leaned out to watch, and even the machine-gun-toting checkpoint guards turned their heads to observe this array of colorful, glittering vehicles perform such intricate high-speed maneuvers.
There was a warmish onshore wind. The Chief carefully gauged his timing before blowing his skull-piercing whistle once again. The bikes and cars still in formation raced their engines, and the zigzaggers slid to a halt with a great screeching of rubber. When all the headlamps up and down Yokatopia Avenue were turned toward the encampment, the Chief took the lead, bellowing like a bull as he roared across the avenue, with the rest of the vehicles—a hundred-plus cars and nearly two hundred motorcycles—peeling out en masse and blowing right through the three checkpoints into the occupied grounds. All of them were already inside the Koryo-controlled zone when a crackle of warning shots punctured the sky. The Chief led his division past Checkpoint C and straight down the highway toward the hotel and Dome, but more than a hundred vehicles had entered through different routes, breaching Checkpoints B and D as well as the two narrow streets on either side of the Chinese consulate and even the Hawks Town parking lot.
The Chief was still at full throttle as the Dome loomed up on their right and the road curved sharply to the left. He laid the bike so low that Shinohara’s knee nearly scraped the asphalt. The long, narrow white lane markers blinked past at blinding speed, the wind in his face was so strong that he could barely keep his eyes open, and the trailing happi coat flapped and snapped violently behind him, as if trying to rip itself to shreds. He could see the Koryo camp on the left. Dozens of soldiers came out to the side of the road and looked on, AKs in hand. The bikes and cars that had taken alternate routes joined the main division in front of the Kyushu Medical Center, and the two deputies pulled up on either side of the Chief’s bike. Hino and Tateno were plastered to the backs of Koizumi and Chonmage to protect themselves from the wind, and both were shouting with either excitement or terror—it was hard to tell if they were grinning or grimacing. Shinohara thought that the same was probably true of himself. Then the Chief’s body seemed to stiffen. Ahead on the left was a group of Koryo soldiers. The soldiers raised their left hands, palm out, signaling them to stop, but the Chief didn’t even slow down. Would they actually shoot? Shinohara heard the Chief shouting: “Koryo Weonjeonggun, chwego-o-o-o-o!” The deputies on either side were driving one-handed, with megaphones in their free hands, supporting the chant. Kaneshiro, Fukuda, and Ando were half outside their cars, waving DPRK flags and joining in: “Mansae-e-e-e-e! Chwego-o-o-o-o!” Could the soldiers hear it? Shinohara too was shouting at the top of his voice, and so were Hino and Tateno. At this point it wasn’t even about trying to be heard by the Koryos; you had to scream something if only to keep the fear at bay.
