“What are the charges, sir?” Kiyoda asked.
“Treason,” the same officer said.
Kiyoda suppressed a smile. He had won! Kamiya had somehow pulled it off. If he had been charged with disobeying orders, he would have lost his command and gone to jail in disgrace. There was no defense against such a specification. But against the charge of treason there were a host of defenses. Half the country was behind him.
“May I be allowed to commit
seppuku
?” Kiyoda asked.
“No,” the first officer said.
“Very well, then. I will accompany you.”
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“Prove InterTech is controlled by a Japanese firm, and we'll win,” Glen Zerkel said.
“There is a more elegant solution,” his brother Louis suggested. “If Mr. Reid has the stomach for it.”
“I'm all ears, my dear fellow,” the older man said. He'd been drinking for twenty-four hours. But like the true functioning alcoholic he wasn't falling-down drunk, just very loose.
“I believe all Guerin's P522's have been equipped with the control chip. If we can prove that, and if we can reprogram a couple of the FAA's flight service stations to send out the trigger signal on our command, we'd be able to bring a lot of airplanes down all at once.”
“Wouldn't they trace the signal back here?” Reid asked.
“That's the beauty of it,” Louis replied. “InterTech will send the signal, and the orders will come from Tokyo.”
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U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Clifford Talmadge had a raging hangover. His head was about to split apart, his eyes felt as if someone had thrown hot sand into them, his mouth tasted like dog shit, and he had a piss hard-on that was killing him. On top of all that, his live-in
girlfriend, Susie Heidinori, was bitching at him to get up, her whiny, needling voice going on and on like an irritating insect.
Last night had started out all right at the Noncommissioned Officers Club on base. Nearly eighty percent of the Seventh was at dock, so Fleet HQ was crammed. It was party time, and when the Navy partied, everybody partied. By 2000 hours there probably wasn't a sober off-duty sailor within a hundred klicks. That's when the exodus into town began.
Yokosuka had been home to the Seventh Fleet since after the war. As a result a lot of great drinking establishments, strip joints, and whorehouses flourished just off base, although lately the city fathers were making moves to clean up the area. Apparently there was some resentment by the locals.
After last night there'd be even more resentment, Talmadge thought. There'd been fights. He'd heard that one of the after-hours clubs had been practically destroyed. And no doubt there'd been a handful of rapes and sexual assaults as well.
Susie came into the bedroom in her black lace bra, panties, garter belt, and nylons, her makeup only half finished. “Goddamn you bastard, Clifford, get your ass out of bed. We're both going to be late.”
Like most Japanese women she was slightly built, with a golden complexion and tiny features. Six months ago when they'd met at a party at the NCO Club he'd thought she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever laid eyes on. But then he was new to this theatre, and the novelty had worn off quickly.
“Fuck you,” Talmadge said good-naturedly, although he was starting to get mad. “It's early. We don't have to be to work until eight.” He was a large man, a former Penn State running halfback, and he'd always had to watch his temper.
“Well, it's quarter 'til, you prick. Get up!” She went into the bathroom and slammed the flimsy door.
She'd stuck a hot poker up his ass. “Sonofabitch,” he
roared grabbing his wristwatch. She was right. He shoved the covers back and scrambled out of bed. This would make the third time this month he was late for work. His C.O. had warned him about it last week.
“I don't care what you do on your own time, mister, until it affects my time,” the old man said. “If need be I'll confine your ass to base. Is that clear?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Talmadge had replied crisply. “It won't happen again.”
Susie worked on base as a bilingual secretary in Procurements. Her boss had reamed her out too.
He put on his shorts from yesterday and pulled a semi-clean set of blues out of the closet.
“For what?” he shouted in frustration. Last night had turned out shitty. He'd gotten into a squabble with a couple of bastards from Meteorology, was thrown out of at least two places he could remember, and in the end he and Susie had gotten into a terrific row about going to listen to a blues combo playing at one of the whorehouses. She liked the music, but she didn't want to go to that kind of place, and he couldn't understand. In the end they'd come back to the apartment downtown, and they tried to make love, but he couldn't do it and he blamed her.
“Christ, fuck, sonofabitch,” he swore, pulling on a pair of dirty socks. For what? “Get the fuck out of the bathroom, I gotta get in there,” he shouted.
Their apartment was on the third floor front, facing busy Kaigan-dori Avenue, in an old brick building that always had been used to house foreigners. Like Kamakura and Yokohama, which were part of the Tokyo megalopolis a few miles north, Yokosuka had been one of the port cities where the British and others seeking trade with Japan were isolated so as not to contaminate the purity of Nippon.
In Talmadge's opinion it was bullshit then and it was bullshit now. The Second World War had established that, all their color TVs, VCRs, stereos, and Toyotas notwithstanding. If it came to it, we'd just kick ass again.
“Get out,” he shouted again, putting on his shirt. He had to shave. But his tongue felt as if it had a three-day growth of fungus on it that only a dozen hours of sleep could possibly cure.
“Just a minute,” Susie yelled.
Talmadge tried the bathroom door, but it was locked. “Goddammit,” he swore. She always locked the door, which really pissed him off. What the hell was she hiding that he hadn't already fucked, kissed, or licked?
Well, he was through being the nice guy. He put his shoulder to the door once very hard, the frame splintering against his 220-pound bulk. Susie, dressed now in her skirt, reared back in alarm, her eyes wide.
“I told you to get the fuck out of here,” he bellowed. He grabbed her roughly by the arm, hauled her out of the tiny bathroom, and threw her against the dresser.
She cried out in pain and looked at him with hate and venom in her eyes, her jaw tight, her body rigid. This moment had been coming for weeks, and they'd both known it.
“Put on your blouse and get us a cab,” Talmadge ordered. “I've got to take a piss and grab a shave, then we can shove off.”
He turned to go into the bathroom when Susie, screeching in rage like a banshee, leaped on his back, biting and scratching his neck and the side of his face. She wanted to draw blood, to hurt him, like he had hurt her so often in their brief relationship. She wanted to knock him to the floor and stomp him into the dirt where he belonged, because he was a lying, bigoted sonofabitch.
The unexpectedness of her attack caught him off guard, and he was driven forward, banging his head against the door frame. Still she wouldn't let up. The bitch really wanted to hurt him.
He spun her into the wall, smashing her against the edge of the door, knocking the air out of her lungs. She grunted and lost her grip on his neck. It was enough. He grabbed her by the hair, plucked her off his back, and
tossed her like a rag doll across the bed and halfway into the tiny living room.
She scrambled to her hands and knees, but Talmadge was much faster.
He came over the bed, grabbed her arm, and yanked her to her feet. “You fucking bitch,” he shouted, spittle flying.
She raked his face with her free hand, her long fingernails opening three gashes in his cheek that began oozing blood.
“Goddamn you whore!” he yelled, completely out of control. He shook her so hard her head flipped back, spraining her neck.
This time she cried out in real pain. She was not angry now. Suddenly she was frightened for her life.
Talmadge was seeing red. He had crossed over the brink to where he wanted nothing more than to hurt her, to cause her pain. To blot her out of the universe.
Still violently shaking her, he shoved her backward into the living room toward the low couch that sat in front of two windows overlooking the street.
“You fucking bitch, all you want is a free ride. You want to be an American. You want us to fuck you, and then you laugh at us behind our backs. I know about you fucking superior Japs. Fucking sneaky bastards. Slant-eye fuckers! Maybe we ought to drop the fucking bomb on you again, teach you some fucking manners.”
Susie was incapable of making even the smallest effort to protect herself. Physically she was no match for Talmadge, who outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds, but she was mentally stunned as well. She'd never seen him act this way, had never seen
anyone
act this way, and she was flabbergasted. She was convinced that he was going to kill her.
At the last moment, Talmadge picked her off her feet, his big, rough hands breaking three of her ribs, and he tossed her over the couch and through one of the windows, the thin bamboo-slat Venetian blinds going with her, and she was gone.
Still it wasn't enough for him. He wanted to hurt her even more, and in his insane rage he was even madder that she hadn't begged for him to stop.
In three steps he was across the living room. He yanked the door open, snapping both locks, and thundered down the dark, narrow stairs to the street. Already a crowd was gathering around Susie where she lay on her back, half off the sidewalk into the street. It was rush hour and traffic was heavy, the street clogged with cars and buses and bicycles. Many of the drivers stopped to see what was happening.
Talmadge bulled his way through the people, his rage still increasing, blind hatred choking out rational thought. He'd always had a chip on his shoulder, especially when he was drinking, and he'd always had a problem controlling it. More than one school psychologist had predicted he would do something very bad one day. But fuck 'em, something was saying at the back of his head. They'd never been laughed at like he had when he'd been a little fat boy. Fat and stupid.
“Bitch!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. He kicked Susie in the side of her rib cage with every ounce of his considerable strength, flopping her body over on its stomach without a sound from her.
She was dead, and those closest in the crowd sighed and tried to step back, but others were coming, pressing them nearer.
She was dead. The stupid bitch had gotten herself killed. He kicked her again with all of his strength, pushing her limp body completely into the street.
He was in some big shit now. There'd be nothing so simple as a Captain's Mast and a weekend in the brig. It just wasn't going to be that easy. He'd killed a woman, a fucking Japanese national, because of his foul temper, and he was going to have to pay the price.
He kicked her again, this time more in frustration than in rage.
“Yamero,”
someone in the crowd shouted, and someone else took it up.
Talmadge understood enough Japanese to know that they were calling for him to stop. But how could he stop? He'd already gone too far. He looked at Susie's bloody body, her arms and legs splayed out, and he felt the first stirrings of remorse mixed with a growing fear and confusion. How could he have done this thing? Christ, how could it have happened?
He looked at the crowd, some of the people jostling forward menacingly, shouting and screaming what sounded like threats. He couldn't remember from his orientation course if Japan had the death penalty, but he figured for sure he would be turned over to the civilian authorities. What he did remember was that Japanese prisons were notorious for hard time, especially for foreigners.
The blare of a police siren sounded like it was just down the street, and Talmadge stepped back a pace. It would be one thing to turn himself over to his own Shore Patrol and get a Navy hearing, but something completely different to get himself arrested by Jap cops. He wouldn't have a chance.
The crowd was pressing even closer, and the siren stopped just on the other side of them. What the hell had he done this time? He had to get to the pay phone in the downstairs hall. He could call the base.
Talmadge charged straight at the crowd, bowling the much smaller Japanese out of his way as if they were nothing. It seemed as if everyone were shouting and screaming, pummeling his back with their fists, kicking at his legs, hitting him with umbrellas, shopping bags, anything they carried.
He broke loose in front of the door to his building at the same time a uniformed cop came up the street in a run, a white plastic holster flapping at his hip.
People in the crowd shouted something to the cop, and pointed at Talmadge, who pulled up and stopped. A second cop came across the street in a dead run, and the people in the crowd shouted what sounded like a warning.