Ice Islands, page 22
‘Your story is that you were kidnapped,’ said Rake. ‘Your brother has paid the ransom. You tell him you spent these hours in the black van. Your kidnappers were hooded. You never saw their faces.’
She nodded.
‘Can you do that?’
‘I can,’ she whispered.
‘Be with him. We will give you equipment so that we follow your every move.’
‘OK.’
‘You sure you’re good with it?’
‘Yes. I am sure.’ Sara uncrossed her legs, swung them off the side of the bed and stood up.
FORTY-FIVE
Alone in the large entrance hall of the Maritime Research Center, Michio Kato paced from side to side, forty steps each way. The ransom was paid. Sara was about to be released. His security team was spread through the forecourt outside. He had put three men across the driveway at the gatehouse.
He had concluded that the kidnappers must be from a rival network, striking now because of his father’s ill-health. They were sending him a message by taking Sara. His reply would be far, far more lethal than a kidnap negotiation. They and their families would experience violent deaths.
But, first, he had to meet the 11 February deadline. His father had chosen the date and in recent years had swung back and forth on whether Michio or Kazan would lead the operation and take the crown of the family. Michio’s first choice had been to stay in New York overseeing legitimate family business. But that ended when he was pulled into a job in Europe which, through no fault of his own, went wrong. Jacob Kato had blamed Michio and his path to the top came to an abrupt halt. It was then, though, that Michio saw his father’s blind spot for Kazan. He was not capable of running anything. Under him, Kato power would deflate, which was when, through anonymous channels, Michio brought in the FBI.
The family was now his for the taking. Its new power would be marked on 11 February when Japan commemorated the founding of the nation. In his mind, Michio replayed the plan, searching for weak points. Assembly of the weapon would be finished at the military base in Wakkanai. Then, it would be transported to a super-trawler. The weapon’s delivery system was a Russian-designed hypersonic missile which, unlike a Cruise missile, would fly low, fast and undetected, taking five minutes and twenty-three seconds to cover the five hundred miles to a small military base in the far north of the island of Etorofu which Russia called Iturup. Wind from the south would take nuclear fallout harmlessly up into the Sea of Okhotsk. The missile was so finely targeted that the dead would be limited to around 150 Russian conscripts and officers quartered there. Given the casualties during its usual wars, even in Ukraine, the deaths would represent barely a slap on the wrist for Russia. In the eyes of Japan, the troops were there illegally, and this would be a nuclear test over Japanese sovereign territory. Planning was meticulous.
Michio paced past the humpback whale and read through the names of the body parts, the flippers, the dorsal fins, the blowholes. His earpiece clicked as he was turning yet again, watching rain streak down the glass front doors.
Sara was free.
He took a bright red rain poncho from a row of hooks on the wall. He didn’t want to be encumbered by an umbrella or a security guy holding it for him.
He stepped out into blinding rain. He walked fast toward the driveway entrance and broke into a run to get to the road. Sara was walking toward him, drenched, water glistening on her tangled hair. She saw him, wiped her face and sprinted toward him.
‘She’s in.’ Rake watched from the back windows of the van in the parking lot across the road. Sara dabbed a tissue on Michio’s forehead to soak up the rain and examined the cut on his cheek. She held Michio’s arm as he led her into the compound and to the black Lexus saloon which had brought them from Tokyo. Taki Umeda translated. ‘She’s saying how she worried about him. Her kidnappers were hooded. She never saw them. She has been sitting in a van which drove around and around. They didn’t speak to her.’
There was no sign of suspicion from Michio. Sara had her bag slung around her shoulder and she kept hold of her brother, not caring about the rain.
‘She’s holding it well,’ observed Taki Umeda. ‘We Japanese are good at layering our feelings.’
‘Carrie? You reading?’ asked Rake.
‘She’s doing OK.’ Carrie had argued against sending Sara in so soon. Lucas and Rake insisted they didn’t have time to wait. ‘Her emotional reaction matches exactly that of someone going through her experience and being returned to family.’
Carrie was with Lucas in the Pacific Lodge hotel, reading data from sensors embedded within a pair of contact lenses they had given to Sara. The lenses were a joint invention between a private Silicon Valley giant and the CIA. Tiny solar-powered chips embedded in the lenses were able to send through very basic visuals and acoustics, as well as monitoring the wearer’s biological changes such as blood pressure and raised levels of fear and excitement. They had been switched for Sara’s real ones and custom-made on the base while she was being briefed in the Pacific Lodge.
Michio opened the back door of the Lexus saloon. Sara climbed in. Michio got in the other side. The lead car pulled out. The Lexus followed. The chase car took up the rear. The barrier swooped up. Men at the guardhouse bowed as the convoy moved onto the street and turned right toward Yokohama.
The car was the same but seemed different. The armrest was down between Sara and Michio. There was a smell of new leather she hadn’t noticed before and only the driver, no bodyguard.
‘Where are we going?’ Sara asked.
‘It was my fault. Father insisted, but I was stupid to let you be seen at the shrine.’ Michio worked his phone. ‘They threatened me to my face. Took you. Made me pay. They are putting down a marker and we will respond.’ His gaze was on his phone’s keyboard, not her.
‘Why me? I’m a nobody.’
‘Because they know you are my sister and that I love you.’
Instinctively she touched his arm, even though Rake had warned her not to let him prize open her feelings. The wipers pounded rhythmically, the rain so hard she could only see a blur of headlamps and backlights out of the window.
‘They are people who don’t want us to succeed.’ Michio finished sending his message, pulled a bottle of water from the seat holder and took a long drink. ‘But that’s for later, Sara. You’re safe. And that’s the most important thing.’ He gave her a caring smile.
Sara reached across to his hand. ‘So where are we going, big brother?’
‘Do you want to see Father again?’
‘No.’ Sara replied too sharply. Her heart began to race, and she drew a breath. ‘I mean: Why? Not in that house, Michio. Please. I don’t think I can ever go back there.’ She leant her forehead against the rain-swept window to feel the cool of the glass.
‘We are administering death with dignity to him at the end of the week,’ said Michio. ‘He has asked it to be for noon on the twelfth of February.’
‘We don’t have to be there, do we?’ She stiffened at the thought and Michio noticed. Rake had talked to her. Taki Umeda, too. A psychologist called Carrie told her how difficult it might be. Don’t fight it, understand it, Carrie had advised.
‘You don’t have to go. I do.’ Michio’s phone lit up with another message. He told the driver to change route and take them to Haneda Airport.
‘Don’t tell me, we’re flying off to the Greek islands.’ Sara gave a quick smile.
Michio took a folder from his briefcase on the floor. ‘We’re going to open a new Maritime Research Center the operations center for the national park we will create on Iturup.’ He spread a sheet of architect’s sketches across the armrest. ‘Here, see? The northern tip of Hokkaido. Father bought this land around the old American air base. We have a hotel and golf course.’
He tapped his finger as he explained. ‘Factories underpin the local economy. We’ve renovated the port for our fishing industry and it’s less than fifty miles from the Sakhalin peninsula. Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Northern Territories. Our grandfather, Tozen, ensured the family put down roots there. We are very strong in Hokkaido. No one can touch us. You will be totally safe.’
Michio was back with his phone. He made a call and said in a clipped tone, ‘We’re ready. How long will it take?’ He listened to the answer while folding the sketches, his gaze sweeping back and forth outside the window. ‘Good,’ he finished. ‘We’re on our way.’
FORTY-SIX
The nuclear weapons engineer speaking to Michio Kato bunched up her shoulder-length black hair, covering it with a cap of thick blue cotton. She slipped off her black leather flat-heeled business shoes, stepped out of her skirt and put on blue overalls hanging in a cupboard of her small office. She turned off her phone, removed the battery and the SIM card and left them in the cupboard. She took a new phone from her stock, one that was embedded with a Geiger counter to measure radiation levels.
She left her office, locked the door and made her way through the maze of metal walkways and corridors of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant in Aomori prefecture on the northern edge of Japan’s main island, Honshu. Her electronic swipe card, iris scans and palm prints allowed her full access throughout the sprawling facility. Managers knew she operated with the highest authorization. Only a handful of people were aware of her role
Protecting her face with a scarf, she went outside into a screaming wind whose chill factor took the temperature down to minus twenty or more. It hit her like ice from a shower, knocking away any dullness in her mind. The sheer force of the cold helped curtail elation and excitement of what she had to do. She was an engineer, not a politician or a visionary.
She took several tight breaths to acclimatize her lungs to the bitter weather. Rokkasho’s forty snow-laden buildings covered more than a square mile. This was where Japan stockpiled enough plutonium for dozens of nuclear warheads. Most had come from Japan’s own reactors. Some had been shipped from Britain and the United States. When building began at Rokkasho in the early 1990s, Kato companies were contracted for critical construction work. They provided security in a way that infuriated the Americans. There were no mandated staff background checks on the grounds that such intrusion would be against Japanese culture. Because of the country’s strict gun laws, the guards were unarmed. There was barely any training on how to handle a terror attack on a nuclear facility.
Over the years, while studying weapons engineering, she had watched the mood of her nation change. There were growing movements to expel the American troops and more talk about forging a new, independent nation. She had little interest in the politics. But her father was obsessed, and her duty, as his daughter, was to contribute toward his happiness.
Rather than take the underground corridors linking Rokkasho’s facilities, she chose to walk, hunched forward against snow driving in from the sea. The plant was built around an inlet from the Pacific coast, with separate sections for plutonium reprocessing, low-level nuclear waste, mixed oxide fuels from reprocessed material and, on the other side of the inlet, for uranium enrichment.
She headed for none of those. Her destination was a small warehouse on the edge of a recently added landing strip. From the outside, the warehouse appeared to have two large steel doors of fading red paint, secured by a regular padlock. Anyone who approached would be turned away by men looking like routine security guards. A closer eye would show that they were fitter and more alert than most guarding Rokkasho. An experienced eye would spot slight bulges in the tunics from concealed weapons.
Her swipe card got her through a side door to the main entrance, and into an antechamber where she went through electronic identification. Once through, two men, weapons visible, walked her through a large area used for the making of nuclear warheads and for computer-simulated testing. At the end, locked and strapped into trolleys of reinforced steel, were the nuclear pits, named after the hard core from stone fruits such as peaches and dates. This was the heart of the bomb, where detonation compressed a plutonium sphere, beginning a chain reaction that produced a force of destructive energy. Each was identical, measuring 43 centimeters high, 52 wide and 120 long, smaller than anything else around, like a parcel with a round lump at each end for the primary and secondary detonations. With long and painstaking work, she had succeeded in getting the weight down to 257 kilograms.
At their destination, the pit would be fitted into the warhead to become part of the delivery system. She had no idea if they would be launched from an aircraft, a ship, a submarine or a silo. Her business was only to get them there.
She signaled the technician in charge who confirmed the aircraft was in position. Security staff, trained many times in this exercise, wheeled the trolleys to an elevator which lifted them directly into the hold of the aircraft positioned on the apron above. The four-man transport team followed. Finally, she rode the elevator herself into the belly of an adapted Boeing 737. The trolleys were locked into the racks at the rear. She took a seat at the front with her team.
As they taxied for take-off, the pilot announced flying time would be one hour and seventeen minutes. He did not say where they were going.
FORTY-SEVEN
Sara’s contact lenses struggled in dim light from the vehicle’s darkened windows to deliver a clear image of the architect’s drawing Michio was showing her. Harry Lucas needed to run them through pixelation-enhancing software to get enough definition to pinpoint the exact coordinates of his new maritime research center.
‘It’s around an old US air base and radar station.’ Lucas’s split screen allowed details to unfold in a column on the right. ‘The Japanese took it back in 1972. Now it’s operated by the Japanese Defense Force, the 301 Coastal Surveillance Unit and 2nd Defense Intelligence Division.’
Harry, Rake and Taki Umeda fell into silence, reading and assessing as details came through. A trash can was spilling over with pizza and sushi cartons, whose smell of pepperoni, soy sauce and wasabi, together with old coffee and male sweat lingered, not the best for clear thinking. The name of the city was Wakkanai, on Japan’s northernmost edge.
‘Fifty miles north is Russia’s Sakhalin,’ said Taki Umeda. ‘Tides of war have tossed people there back and forth between Russia and Japan. Sakhalin was Japanese until the Pacific War.’
‘And the base?’ asked Harry.
‘Listening and intelligence gathering on Russia,’ said Umeda. ‘The regeneration around it has been done by private developers.’
‘Mikki’s onto that,’ said Rake. Since becoming a detective with the Alaska State Troopers, Mikki Wekstatt had proved skillful in pinpointing illegal operations by matching factories, airlines, company executives – whatever caught his eye – to establish criminal links. His rushed task now was to establish anything that linked construction and development to the Kato family.
‘Fishing. The port.’ Umeda pointed to the harbor a few miles south of the base. Statistics appeared on the column. Wakkanai was the top Japanese port for Russian fishing boats. Japanese companies also funded oil and gas exploration in Russian waters off the Sakhalin coast. ‘Two parallels,’ explained Umeda. ‘Japanese governments become colder toward Russia. Trade becomes warmer, and in Hokkaido it’s hot love.’
Rake saw that the US had a base at Chitose in Hokkaido. The team could fly there, commandeer a stealth Black Hawk, and Mark Roller could fly them to Wakkanai. By then Lucas should have collated real intelligence on what Michio Kato was doing. But that was conjecture. Michio might have been showing Sara innocent sketches and heading somewhere else altogether. Wakkanai could be a decoy.
‘Taki, a moment outside.’ Rake needed to know how far Umeda would go if Kato brought in support of Japanese troops from the base. Breaking the Kato family was one thing. Going face-to-face with the Japanese military was another. When they first worked together in Myanmar, Umeda’s jet-black hair had been shorn to a buzzcut. Now it was thick, long, and tied back with bands to keep it out of his face. Outside in the corridor, Rake asked, ‘How far does this go?’
‘It goes everywhere. This is Japan. There are no lines.’ Umeda gave a sharp, short smile. ‘Kato is Zaibatsu, a family-led industrial and financial conglomerate. Zaibatsu were meant to have been rolled up after the war and replaced by the Keiretsu, business groupings like your American chambers of commerce. They worked well for a bit, but failed to get Japan out of its slump, move it away from American reliance, keep it ahead of South Korea and China. So, the Zaibatsu came back with people like the Katos. Zaibatsu was remembered as the nucleus of the system that had made Japan a great power in the 1930s. That is what so many here want to see again, a Japan with its own voice and strength. Like Yakuza, Zaibatsu never really went away. A strand runs from street muscle to the government. To get elected, a politician collects a debt of honor which keeps them in check.’ Taki spoke, gazing down at the green carpet along the wide, dimly lit corridor. ‘We’re dealing with the proud institutions of my country.’
‘If the threat comes from the port and the fishing industry?’ asked Rake.
Umeda looked straight at Rake, knowing what he was asking. ‘I’m very happy to fight Russian and Japanese gangsters.’
‘From the base?’
‘I’m out.’ Umeda grimaced. ‘I know you, Rake. It won’t be quiet, and I will not betray you, but I will not open fire on my colleagues.’
Rake gave him a single nod. They had a deal. ‘You gather your people up. I’ll check with Carrie how Sara’s doing.’
The team was spread through rooms along the corridor. Rake knocked on Carrie’s door. ‘It’s unlocked.’ When he walked in, Carrie said, ‘Michio and Sara are taking a Gulfstream to Wakkanai.’
‘You good to go?’ Rake felt a stab of relief. The talking and guessing were over.
‘Can we track Sara from the plane?’ As always, Carrie was concerned about her patient.
