“You are a poet,” the copilot said, once more impressed by the man’s skill.
Sato allowed himself a smile as he engaged reverse-thrust. “You taxi in.” Then he keyed the cabin intercom.
“Welcome to Japan,” he told the passengers.
Yamata didn’t shout only because the remark surprised him so. He didn’t wait for the aircraft to stop before he unbuckled. The door to the flight deck was right there, and he had to say something.
“Captain?”
“Yes, Yamata-san?”
“You understand, don’t you?”
His nod was that of a proud professional, and in that moment one very much akin to the zaibatsu. “Hai.” His reward was a bow of the finest sincerity, and it warmed the pilot’s heart to see Yamata-san’s respect.
The businessman was not in a hurry, not now. The bureaucrats and administrative soldiers worked their way off the aircraft into waiting buses that would take them to the Hotel Nikko Saipan, a large modern establishment located in the center of the island’s west coast, which would be the temporary administrative headquarters for the occupa—for the new government, Yamata corrected himself. It took five minutes for all of them to deplane, after which he made his own way off to another Toyota Land Cruiser whose driver, this time, was one of his employees who knew what to do without being told, and knew that this was moment for Yamata to savor in silence.
He scarcely noticed the activity. Though he’d caused it to happen, it was less important than its anticipation had been. Oh, perhaps a brief smile at the sight of the military vehicles, but the fatigue was real now, and his eyes drooped despite an iron will that commanded them to be bright and wide. The driver had planned the route with care, and managed to avoid the major tieups. Soon they passed the Marianas Country Club again, and though the sun was up, there were no golfers in evidence. There was no military presence either except for two satellite uplink trucks on the edge of the parking lot, newly painted green after having been appropriated from NHK. No, we mustn’t harm the golf course, now without a doubt the most expensive single piece of real estate on the island.
It was right about here, Yamata thought, remembering the shape of the hills. His father’s rude little store had been close to the north airfield, and he could remember the A6M Type-Zero fighters, the strutting aviators, and the often overbearing soldiers. Over there had been the sugarcane processing plant of Nanyo Kohatsu Kaisha, and he could remember stealing small bits of the cane and chewing on them. And how fair the breezy mornings had been. Soon they were on his land. Yamata shook off the cobwebs by force of will and stepped out of the car, walking north now.
It was the way his father and mother and brother and sister must have come, and he imagined he could see his father, hobbling on his crippled leg, struggling for the dignity that his childhood disease had always denied him. Had he served the soldiers in those last days, bringing them what useful things he had? Had the soldiers in those last days set aside their crude insults at his physical condition and thanked him with the sincerity of men for whom death was now something seen and felt in its approach? Yamata chose to believe both. And they would have come down this draw, their retreat toward death protected by the last rear-guard action of soldiers in their last moment of perfection.
It was called Banzai Cliff by the locals, Suicide Cliff by the less racist. Yamata would have to have his public-relations people work on changing the name to something more respectful. July 9, 1944, the day organized resistance ended. The day the Americans had declared the island of Saipan “secure.”
There were actually two cliffs, curved and facing inward as though a theater; the taller of them was two hundred forty meters above the surface of the beckoning sea. There were marble columns to mark the spot, built years earlier by Japanese students, shaped to represent children kneeling in prayer. It would have been here that they’d approached the edge, holding hands. He could remember his father’s strong hands. Would his brother and sister have been afraid? Probably more disoriented than fearful, he thought, after twenty-one days of noise and horror and incomprehension. Mother would have looked at father. A warm, short, round woman whose jolly musical laugh rang again in her son’s ears. The soldiers had occasionally been gruff with his father, but never with her. And never with the children. And the last service the soldiers had rendered had been to keep the Americans away from them at that final moment, when they’d stepped off the cliff. Holding hands, Yamata chose to believe, each holding a child in a final loving embrace, proudly refusing to accept captivity at the hands of barbarians, and orphaning their other son. Yamata could close his eyes and see it all, and for the first time the memory and the imagined sight made his body shudder with emotion. He’d never allowed himself anything more than rage before, all the times he’d come here over the years, but now he could truly let the emotions out and weep with pride, for he had repaid his debt of honor to those who had given him birth, and his debt of honor to those who had done them to death. In full.
The driver watched, not knowing but understanding, for he knew the history of this place, and he too was moved to tears as a shaking man of sixty-odd years clapped his hands to call the attention of sleeping relatives. From a hundred meters away, he saw the man’s shoulders rack with sobs, and after a time, Yamata lay down on his side, in his business suit, and went to sleep. Perhaps he would dream of them. Perhaps the spirits of whoever it was, the driver thought, would visit him in his sleep and say what things he needed to hear. But the real surprise, the driver thought, was that the old bastard had a soul at all. Perhaps he’d misjudged his boss.
“Damn if they ain’t organized,” Oreza said to himself, looking through his binoculars, the cheap ones he kept in the house.
The living-room window afforded a view of the airports, and the kitchen gave one of the harbor. Orchid Ace was long gone, and another car ferry had taken her berth, Century Highway No. 5, her name was, and this one was unloading jeep-type vehicles and trucks. Portagee was fairly strung-out, having forced himself to stay up all night. He’d now done twenty-seven hours without sleep, some of them spent working hard on the ocean west of the island. He was too old for that sort of thing, the master chief knew. Burroughs, younger and smarter, had curled up on the living-room rug and was snoring away.
Oreza wished for a cigarette for the first time in years. They were good for staying alert. You just needed them at a time like this. They were what a warrior used—at least that’s what the World War II movies proclaimed. But this wasn’t World War II, and he wasn’t a warrior. For all he’d done in his over thirty years in the United States Coast Guard, he’d never fired a shot in anger, even on his one Vietnam tour. Someone else had always been on the gun. He didn’t know how to fight.
“Up all night?” Isabel asked, dressed for her job. It was Monday on this side of the International Dateline, and a workday. She looked down and saw that the pad of note paper usually kept next to the phone was covered with scribbles and numbers. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t know, Izz.”
“Want some breakfast?”
“It can’t hurt,” Pete Burroughs said, stretching as he came into the kitchen. “I think I conked out around three.” A moment’s consideration. “I feel like ... hell,” he said, in deference to the lady in the room.
“Well, I have to be at my desk in an hour or so,” Mrs. Oreza observed, pulling open the refrigerator. Breakfast in this house consisted of a selection of cold cereals and skim milk, Burroughs saw, along with toast made of the bread baked from straw. Toss in a little fruit, he thought, and he could have been back in San Jose. The coffee he could already smell. He found a cup and poured some.
“Somebody really knows how to do this right.”
“It’s Manni,” Isabel said.
Oreza smiled for the first time in hours. “I learned it from my first chief. The right blend, the right proportions, and a pinch of salt.”
Probably in the dark of the moon and after sacrificing
a goat, Burroughs thought. If so, however, the goat had died for a noble cause. He took a long sip and came over to check Oreza’s tally sheet.
“That many?”
“Could be conservative. It’s two flying hours from here to Japan. That’s four on the round-trip. Let’s be generous and say ninety minutes on the ground at each end. Seven-hour cycle. Three and a half trips per airplane per day. Each flight about three hundred, maybe three-fifty soldiers per hop. That means every plane brings in a thousand men. Fifteen airplanes operating over one day, that means a whole division of troops. You suppose the Japs have more than fifteen 747s?” Portagee asked. “Like I said, conservative. Now it’s just a matter of bringing their mobile equipment in.”
“How many ships for that?”
Another frown. “Not sure. During the Persian Gulf War—I was over there then doing port-security work ... damn. Depends on what ships you use and how you pack them. I’ll be conservative again. Twenty large merchant hulls just to ferry in the gear. Trucks, jeeps, all kinds of stuff you’d never think of. It’s like moving a cityful of people. They need to resupply fuel. This rock doesn’t grow enough food; that has to come in by ship, too, and the population of this place just doubled. The water supply might be stretched.” Oreza looked down and made a notation on that. “Anyway, they came to stay. That’s for damned sure,” he said, heading for the table and his Special K, wishing for three eggs up, bacon, white-bread toast with butter, hash-browns, and all the cholesterol that went with it. Damn turning fifty!
“What about me?” the engineer asked. “I seen you pass for a local. I sure as hell can’t.”
“Pete, you’re my charter, and I’m the captain, okay? I am responsible for your safety. That’s the law of the sea, sir.”
“We’re not at sea anymore,” Burroughs pointed out.
Oreza was annoyed by the truth of the observation. “My daughter’s the lawyer. I try to keep things simple. Eat your breakfast. I need some sleep, and you have to take over the forenoon watch.”
“What about me?” Mrs. Oreza asked.
“If you don’t show up for work—”
“—somebody will wonder why.”
“It’ll be nice to know if they told the truth about the cops who got shot,” her husband went on. “I’ve been up all night, Izz. I haven’t heard a single shot. Every crossroads seems to be manned, but they’re not doing anything to anybody.” He paused. “I don’t like it either, honey. One way or another we have to deal with it.”
“Did you do it, Ed?” Durling asked bluntly, his eyes boring in on his Vice President. He cursed the man for forcing him to deal with one more problem among the multiple crises hanging over his presidency now. But the Post piece gave him no choice.
“Why are you hanging me out to dry? Why didn’t you at least warn me of this?”
The President waved around the Oval Office. “There are a lot of things you can do in here and there are things you can’t do. One of them is to interfere with a criminal investigation.”
“Don’t give me that! A lot of people have—”
“Yeah, and they all paid a price for it, too.” It’s not my ass that needs to be covered, Roger Durling didn’t say. I’m not risking mine for yours. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Look, Roger!” Ed Kealty snarled back. The President stopped him with a raised hand and a quiet voice.
“Ed, I have an economy in meltdown. I have dead sailors in the Pacific Ocean. I can’t spare the energy for this. I can’t spare the political capital. I can’t spare the time. Answer my question,” Durling commanded.
The Vice President flushed, his head snapping to the right before he spoke. “All right, I like women. I’ve never hidden that from anyone. My wife and I have an understanding.” His head came back. “But I have never, NEVER molested, assaulted, raped, or forced myself on anybody in my whole fucking life. Never. I don’t have to.”
“Lisa Beringer?” Durling said, consulting his notes for the name.
“She was a sweet thing, very bright, very sincere, and she begged me to—well, you can guess. I explained to her that I couldn’t. I was up for reelection that year, and besides she was too young. She deserved somebody her age to marry and give her kids and a good life. She took it hard, started drinking—maybe something else, but I don’t think so. Anyway, one night she headed off on the Beltway and lost it, Roger. I was there for the funeral. I still talk with her parents. Well,” Kealty said, “not lately, I guess.”
“She left a note, a letter behind.”
“More than one.” Kealty reached into his coat pocket and handed two envelopes over. “I’m surprised nobody noticed the date on the one the FBI has. Ten days before her death. This one is a week later, and this one is the day she was killed. My staff found them. I suppose Barbara Linders found the other one. None were ever mailed. I think you’ll find some differences between them, all three, as a matter of fact.”
“The Linders girl says that you—”
“Drugged her?” Kealty shook his head. “You know about my drinking problem, you knew it when you asked me in. Yeah, I’m an alcoholic, but I had my last drink two years ago.” A crooked smile. “My sex life is even better now. Back to Barbara. She was sick that day, the flu. She went to the pharmacy on the Hill and got a prescription, and—”
“How do you know that?”
“Maybe I keep a diary. Maybe I just have a good memory. Either way, I know the date this happened. Maybe one of my staffers checked the records of the pharmacy, and maybe the medication she took had a label on the bottle, one that says don’t drink while using these capsules. I didn’t know that, Roger. When I have a cold—well, back then, anyway, I used brandy. Hell,” Kealty admitted, “I used booze for a lot of things. So I gave some to her, and she became very cooperative. A little too cooperative, I suppose, but I was half in the bag myself, and I figured it was just my well-known charm.”
“So what are you telling me? You’re not guilty?”
“You want to say I’m an alley cat, can’t keep it zipped? Yeah, I guess so. I’ve been to priests, to doctors, to a clinic once—covering that up was some task. Finally I went to the head of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. They think there’s a part of the brain that regulates our drives, just a theory, but a good one. It goes along with hyperactivity. I was a hyperactive child. I still don’t ever sleep more than six hours a night. Roger, I am all those things, but I am not a rapist.”
So there it was, Durling thought. Not a lawyer himself, he had appointed, consulted, and heard enough of them to know what he’d been told. Kealty could defend himself on two grounds: that the evidence against him was more equivocal than the investigators imagined, and that it wasn’t really his fault. The President wondered which of the defenses might be true. Neither? One? Both?
“So what are you going to do?” he asked the Vice President, using much the same voice he’d summoned a few hours earlier for the Ambassador from Japan. He was increasingly sympathetic with the man sitting across from him, in spite of himself. What if the guy really was telling the truth? How could he know—and that was what the jury would say, after all, if it got that far; and if a jury would think that, then what would the Judiciary hearings be like? Kealty still had a lot of markers out on the Hill.
“Somehow I just don’t think anyone’s going to print up DURLING/KEALTY bumper stickers this summer, right?” The question came with a smile of sorts.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” the President confirmed, cold again. This wasn’t a time for humor.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Roger. I did two days ago. If you’d warned me, I could have told you these things sooner, saved everybody a lot of time and trouble. Including Barbara. I lost track of her. She’s very good on civil-rights stuff, a good head on her, and a good heart. It was only that one time, you know. And she stayed in my office afterwards,” Kealty pointed out.
“We’ve covered that, Ed. Tell me what you want.”
/> “I’ll go. I’ll resign. I don’t get prosecuted.”
“Not good enough,” Durling said in a neutral voice.
“Oh, I’ll admit my weaknesses. I’ll apologize to you, honorable public servant that you are, for any harm I might have done to your presidency. My lawyers will meet with their lawyers, and we’ll negotiate compensation. I leave public life.”
“And if that’s not good enough?”
“It will be,” Kealty said confidently. “I can’t be tried in a court until the constitutional issues are resolved. Months, Roger. All the way to summer, probably, maybe all the way to the convention. You can’t afford that. I figure the worst-case scenario for you is, the Judiciary Committee sends the bill of impeachment to the floor of the House, but the House doesn’t pass it, or maybe does, narrowly, and then the Senate trial ends up with a hung jury, so to speak. Do you have any idea how many favors I’ve done there, and in the Senate?” Kealty shook his head. “It’s not worth the political risk to you, and it distracts you and Congress from the business of government. You need all the time you have. Hell, you need more than that.” Kealty stood and headed toward the door to the President’s right, the one that was so perfectly blended into the curved, eggshell-white walls and gold trim. He spoke his final words without turning. “Anyway, it’s up to you now.”
It angered President Roger Durling that, in the end, the easy way out might be the just way out, as well—but nobody would ever know. They would only know that his final action was politically expedient in a moment of history that demanded political expediency. An economy potentially in ruins, a war just started—he didn’t have the time to fool with this. A young woman had died. Others claimed to have been molested. But what if the dead young girl had died for other reasons, and what if the others—Goddamn it, he swore in his mind. That was something for a jury to decide. But it had to pass through three separate legal procedures before a jury could decide, and then any defense lawyer with half a brain could say that a fair trial was impossible anyway after C-SPAN had done its level best to tell the whole world every bit of evidence, tainting everything, and denying Kealty his constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial before disinterested jurors. That ruling was likely enough in a Federal district court trial, and even more so on appeal—and would gain the victims nothing. And what if the bastard actually was, technically speaking, innocent of a crime? An open zipper, distasteful though it was, did not constitute a crime.