Kim had stopped blinking and was leaning unconsciously toward me. The bargaining center of gravity had shifted in seconds from him to me. Not bad for a stiff-necked old frogman. He could hardly keep from rubbing his hands together with anticipation.
A communications station meant crypto gear, encrypting devices possibly common to North Korea’s code devices. In any event, these devices would be barterable to some other intelligence agency for North Korean code machines. The prospect of surreptitious capture of crypto gear was enough to make an intelligence czar sell his own mother, though I doubted Kim had one unsold this late in his career.
“We could be persuaded to carry back a few key assemblies,” I said as he silently mouthed the words after me.
Kim’s smile was positively chilling. He cleared his throat officially. “You will, of course, need weapons, ammunition, and explosives. We will obtain them for you. The Japanese government has a very unenlightened attitude regarding such matters.”
I proceeded to tell him my plan in detail, granting some allowances for the lack of specific information on the camp and its location. He offered a few suggestions and suddenly I was the proud charterer of a diesel-powered submarine of unspecified origin and vague description. I hoped the camp was indeed used for a communications station. In any event, I would soon find out.
Commander Pak, beside me, smiled—but only with his eyes.
CHAPTER 6
The next evening I returned to Yokohama and found a telegram waiting for me from Ramsund, Norway. Petty Officer Heyer of the Marinejaegerlag had accepted my offer, but could only get leave for three weeks in late February. After climbing the wooden steps, I slid the door to one side, kicked off my shoes, and sat cross-legged on the tatami mats.
Pieter Heyer was a painfully quiet naval commando from Norway. His angular features, his pale blond hair, and pinkish-white complexion all seemed hewn from the ice and snow of his North Sea homeland. Equally at home in fins or on skis, he seldom moved or spoke unless he absolutely had to, but once he did, his actions were resolute and invariably faultless. As a group member, Heyer assumed the role of a valuable individual rather than a leader. He felt more comfortable working with the constants of objects than with the variables of people. A rifle you could rely on; people were a sometime thing. He was the man to assign to equipment and rations. He, too, spoke fluent Russian—more fluently, though less often, than Dravit.
The components were clicking crisply into place. I was ecstatic, a submarine and a technical man with a strong background in two days. With this kind of luck we might pull the thing off, after all. My exhilaration turned to a sudden uneasiness at my rush of good fortune.
I rose from the mats. As I crossed the room I heard my name called from the landing at the bottom of the stairs and turned.
The caller struggled up the stairs with a slightly out-of-sync gait that, with the marbling of scars across his too closely shorn scalp, made recognition immediate. He was a former SEAL point man—one of the best in his day—now patched and mended, but not quite complete.
“Mr. Frazer, how ya doing? Have you seen…”
He named a former SEAL, one we both had known, who was currently in Yokohama on a merchant ship. There was sake on my visitor’s breath.
“Sir, you think you could spare me a little, you know, to tide me over, just this once?”
I couldn’t, nor could I the other times, either. His disability check never lasted him very long. I wasn’t sure whether it was the liquor or the high cost of living out here that made the money vaporize so quickly. The steel plate in his skull seemed to cause money to evaporate faster than hope. His color was poor.
“Step in.”
He took off his shoes and shuffled around the room inquisitively. When his back was turned, I popped a small wad of bills from their hiding place behind a beam. “Trust them… but only with your life,” I’d heard a chief say.
“Thanks, sir, now don’t forget I gotcha covered.” God, he looked vulnerable. It was hard to believe he was the same man I’d seen that night in the U Minh Forest. He’d been badly wounded and, when put on a dustoff chopper, had swatted aside aircrewmen in a raving frenzy. In delirium, he’d hunkered down apelike, and the Army medics didn’t go near him until he’d passed out from loss of blood.
“No sweat. Things have been looking up,” I said, and winked.
He grinned.
“Get it back to me when you can.”
There was no thought of recruiting him. He’d given all he had.
With much bonhomie, he trudged unevenly down the stairs.
Where and when had I become angel to him and so many others? Strange bonds. Trust them… but only with your life.
For a beached frogman who took little notice of money, I seemed ever sensitive to the manner in which it fell between my fingers.
Not too much later, I ambled down to Keiko’s restaurant. Seconds after I had entered, I felt her squeeze my hand as she glided by into the teppanyaki room. Tall by Japanese standards, she bore herself like a princess of the Ama among the restaurant’s well-heeled clientele. Her vibrancy and striking, athletically trim good looks stole your attention. Everyone else in the room seemed bland, part of the background. A Chinese-style yellow sheath dress, a cheongsam—one of my favorites—made her particularly desirable in the soft lights.
A faint piston-like fidget of her hips indicated she had more than one thing on her mind. Ever restive, she could still move through a room with a presence that made rough seas placid.
Keiko Shirahama was the hamlet girl who had grown to want more.
Japan, more than most countries, looks to the sea for sustenance. The Ama, as divers for shellfish and edible seaweed, shared breadwinner status with their fisherman husbands. Their fathers and brothers served as boatmen and tenders while these women divers, equipped with the natural feminine superiority provided by an insulating layer of subcutaneous fat, plunged to the sea bottom day after day.
The term Ama in Japanese was a homonym for the Japanese word for “nun.” There were other similarities; their white scarflike headgear, for instance, bore an eerie resemblance to a nun’s headdress. Ama, however, unlike nuns, had a reputation for being, as one Japanese friend put it, “women with sharp tongue.” Even spicier in personality than most of her fellow divers and quick to translate her moods physically, young Keiko had publicly boxed the ears and berated the fishing cooperative’s headman after a family dispute with the cooperative.
She was prudently hustled off to board with land-bound cousins in Yokohama who treated their novel Ama like a black sheep. Her unmerited status was an affront to her pride, but it offered certain unexpected benefits.
Forced to take a job as a restaurant bookkeeper and hostess in an establishment that catered to—horror of horrors—foreign devils, gaijin, she found it surprisingly to her liking. By Japanese standards, foreigners had rough edges, and so did Ama. She bought the restaurant a year or two later. Only after realizing the world she had been born to and loved had grown too small.
The attraction to life in a larger arena was in constant tension with the values and traits inculcated by time and heredity. Undeniably, she had been forged by hard work and tempered in cold water. The Yokohama waterfront presented as pluralistic a community as Japan could offer. Physical courage and hardship endured were the watchwords of the Izu Peninsula fisher folk, and in her adopted world she gravitated to those who traded in those qualities.