“So,” Harmon said, “why do the North Koreans want documents concerning the Japanese Imperial Navy from August and September 1945?”
“You tell me,” Lake said.
“I don’t know what was specifically in the box,” she said, leading him toward the door. “Therefore I can’t extrapolate based on data I don’t have.”
“In other words, you don’t have a clue,” Lake said.
“Do you?” she shot back as she locked the door.
“Not yet. Why do you have all these documents?” Lake asked.
“I have a Ph.D. in history and I teach here,” Harmon said as they reentered her office. She sat back down behind her desk and Lake reclaimed the leather chair. “My area of specialty is Pacific Studies, mid-twentieth century. The biggest event of that time period was World War II. Every academic has to find their niche. Some pick their niche then go around accumulating source material. I had the general area and when I found out there was a treasure trove of source material about the Japanese navy during World War II so close at Alameda, it didn’t take a sledgehammer for me to see what area I should specialize in.”
“Since all we know is a rough time period,” Lake said, “why don’t we focus on that?” “August 1945 was the end of the war,” Doctor Harmon said. She closed her eyes and ticked off each item as she said it. “The key events of that month in the Pacific were the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; on the eighth of August the Soviet Union declared war on Japan; numerous conventional air strikes were conducted against Japanese mainland targets, primarily the cities of Tokokawa, Yawata,Hikari, Nagoya and Toyama with the last air raid coming on the fourteenth of August; the U.S. and British fleets conducted air strikes from carriers in the vicinity of Tokyo; on the fourteenth of August the Emperor made a broadcast to the people telling them that they must ‘bear the unbearable’; the fifteenth of August is what we call VJ Day; by the eighteenth of August the Russians over ran most of Manchuria; and on the twenty-seventh of that month the Allied Reel anchored in Tokyo Bay in preparation for the surrender which was signed on the second of September.”
She opened her eyes. “As far as the Japanese fleet goes, there wasn’t much happening that month.”
Lake leaned back in the chair, feeling the comfort of the soft leather. He knew Feliks would have a cow if he found out Lake was talking to a civilian like this. But he found talking was helping to clear the fog all the events of the past week had put over everything. “Let’s try to connect the dots. This is 1997. You’ve got the North Koreans, the Black Ocean Society, and the Japanese government all looking for some document concerning Imperial Fleet operations in August or September 1945. A document that is so important that several people have already been killed trying to recover it.”
He was watching Harmon’s face and he noticed something he’d noticed before when he’d mentioned the Black Ocean Society: a flicker of recognition. Lake waited while the doctor picked up a letter opener in the shape of a samurai sword and lightly ran the edge of her thumb along the blade.
“There is something,” she said. “Or perhaps I should say there may be something.”
“Yes?”
“When you mentioned the Black Ocean Society and North Korea, something I’d read about once clicked. It’s kind of outrageous, but your story right now is kind of outrageous so …” Her voice trailed off.
“Tell me,” Lake prompted.
Harmon stood. “I’ll have to show you what I’m talking about.”
“Where are we going?” Lake asked.
“The library.”
They walked in silence across the campus, each lost in their own thoughts. Lake felt a buzz in his pocket as they neared the library. “Excuse me,” he said to Harmon as he pulled his phone out. He hoped it wasn’t Feliks calling for an explanation of the last several days. It wasn’t. He recognized Araki’s voice: “Nishin has left his surveillance post.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m staying with the ship,” Araki said. “I believe Nishin must return here.”
“Any sign the ship is leaving?”
“They’ve filed with the harbormaster to depart between 2000 and 2200 this evening.”
“All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Lake said. He pushed the off button. “Something up?” Harmon asked as they continued their walk and entered the library.
“No.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. They went down a flight of stairs to a room with several computer desks set up before stacks of magazines and newspapers.
“We’ve got everything over a year old on CD ROM Harmon explained as she sat down in front of one of the computers. Lake pulled a chair up next to hers. “We have almost every major city newspaper in here. I’m doing a search for a newspaper article I read once. I think it was dated 1954 or 1955.”
“Which newspaper?” Lake asked “I don’t remember.”
“Then how—” Lake began, but Harmon shushed him, her fingers typing two words into the database search: HUNGNAM. It produced one hit in reply.
“Wait here,” Harmon said. She was only gone a minute before she returned with a CD inside a plastic case. She pushed it in and hit the enter key. A faded picture of a newspaper page appeared on the screen. “The Oakland Tribune, dated 14 May 1955,” Harmon said. “Read it.”
VETERAN RECALLS JAPANESE SECRET BASE
As the dust from the last bat ties of the Second World War was still settling, Major Frank Harlan, an investigator for the Naval Intelligence Service, NIS, found himself in what we now know as North Korea, in a race with Soviet Russian agents to uncover the mysteries of a secret Japanese base. The same base that Marines retreating from the Chosin Reservoir just a few months ago apparently stumbled across.
“Our orders were to grab anything that might be of significant military value, be it man, machine or document,” Harlan recalls from the porch of his South Oakland house. ““I’d already been in mainland Japan for two weeks after the formal surrender was signed. I was sent to Hungnam, a coastal town on the east side of the Korean, peninsula, because prisoners we interrogated in Japan indicated that a major industrial complex was there. I flew over on a Navy PBY and landed in the harbor.”
Located there on the Sea of Japan, the town was indeed a major industrial center with dozens of factories dotting the valley floor. Harlan knew something was strange about Hungnam from the moment his plane came into sight of the city.
“The harbor was devastated,” Harlan said. “I’d heard that the Russians [who were occupying Hungnam and all of the northern part of Korea] had a tendency to pound the hell out of an objective when taking it, and that had certainly happened there. The entire town facing the water had been knocked flat. A few boats had been tossed inland several hundred feet and there was no way I could figure out how that had happened. A small island in the center of the harbor looked as if it had been pounded with a sledgehammer According to the prewar charts I was using, the island was less than one third its origin size and what remained was totally stripped clean of any life.””
It wasn’t until a month later that Major Harlan came up with a possible answer. But in the meanwhile, his two-week stay in Hungnam was less than profitable. “The Soviets followed me everywhere and they weren’t friendly. There were parts of Hungnam totally off-limits to me and we were not allowed to speak to any natives. I had no doubt that they were doing the same thing I was, except on a much greater scale. While I was there I watched them totally dismantle two ammunition factories, rivet by rivet, load the parts onto rail cars and ship them back to Russia. They were stripping the place bare.””
The devastation in the harbor weighed on Harlan’s mind, though. He noted it in his official report which he filed upon returning to his unit in Japan, suggesting perhaps that the Russians had used some new form of massively powerful conventional munitions.