“The box contains Japanese naval records from August 1945.”
Kuzumi relaxed slightly.
“I am not sure exactly what records,” the voice continued.
“It will be taken care of,” Kuzumi said. ‘~“What about the Americans?”
“The lid is still on.”
“All right. We must ensure it stays on.” He turned the phone off.
Kuzumi flicked a switch which ensured he would not be disturbed, then he closed his eyes and thought.
So strange that the Koreans should go to UCBerkeley where he had worked so many years ago. He was relieved that they were only after documents from the war. He knew that records of his presence there in 1939 might exist, but there was no way the Koreans could connect that with him now. He was supposed to have died in 1945. The only person who knew he was still alive and the Genoysha of the Black Ocean was Nakanga.
When he had been returned from the Russian camp, Genoysha Taiyo had assigned Nakanga to care for him and look after him, cutting Kuzumi off from all other outside contact. Then he had been given a new identity and brought back into the fold, working in the super-secret inner circle of the Society. To all it had long ago been reported that he had died at Hiroshima in 1945.
Kuzumi’s left eyebrow twitched, the only sign that that thought had evoked a strong emotion in him. Because he felt he ought to have died at Hiroshima. His son had.
When Genoysha Taiyo had confronted him about Nira’s pregnancy and subsequent childbirth, Kuzumi had been shocked, yet secretly elated that he now had a son.
He knew he would have been killed over the issue if it wasn’t for the fact that the Society needed his atomic expertise so badly. Leaving a child in a foreign country, one that Japan would soon be at war with, was not the most secure action an agent could have done. The possibility for blackmail, or at least attempted blackmail, was high. Also, the illegitimate child threatened Nira’s position working at the university. But because Nira continued to work for the Black Ocean and they did not doubt Kuzumi’s loyalty, initially Genoysha Taiyo’ had not considered the boy to be a problem. But then war came in December 1941, and Nira was in enemy territory with their son.
His Sensei explained it to him. Since the situation was unacceptable and Kuzumi was too valuable for action to be taken on him, another course of action must be implemented. Kuzumi had felt fear then. He knew what the Society was capable of and he feared that they were going to kill his son.
But the Genoysha had an idea, his Sensei explained. “We will bring your son here. He will become part of the Society.”
Kuzumi felt tremendous relief at hearing those words. He soon found out that the Black Ocean was in contact with an extensive spy network run by the Spanish called “TO,” Japanese for door. The Spanish relayed information through their embassy in Washington to Madrid, where it was forwarded to Tokyo. This was the way Nira was able to update them on the status of Lawrence’s work on the electronic process for U-235 separation, the part of the Manhattan Project that was being conducted under his direction. It was also how the Genzai Bakudan project was finding out other essential information that helped keep the project moving.
The TO network could also move people. In April 1942 they picked up Kuzumi’s and Nira’s son, James, and took him south, across the border into Mexico. They loaded him onto a Mexican fishing boat which rendezvoused with a Japanese submarine in the South Pacific.
Kuzumi had met his son at dockside upon his arrival. He promptly renamed his son Sakae after his own father and also because the American name would have brought him untold grief among the other children at the Society Home place school. Kuzumi spent every available moment with him, although with the pressures of the project there wasn’t much of that. He was able to send an occasional encrypted letter back to Nira through the TO network, telling her how Sakae was growing. Unfortunately, he was not allowed to send her any pictures. His major desire became to finish work on Genzai Bakudan in order to help bring about a quick end to the war.
But the project progressed slowly. On the thirty-first of May 1942, in San Francisco, Nira watched the American battleships Colorado and Maryland pass beneath the Golden Gate Bridge under a full head of steam heading west, not knowing that they were already too late to join the American fleet which was massing off of Midway in response to having broken the Japanese secret code and anticipating their assault on that island. Kuzumi was in Japan, still working on theoretical problems with designing an atomic weapon. He and the other scientists were wrestling with how to separate out U-235 from the uranium deposits they had and what the critical mass would be that they would need.
It was work that took years rather than months. And the Battle of Midway had changed the complexion of the war. The Americans were now on the offensive. The year 1943 saw the tide decisively swing toward the United States and the Imperial forces were on the defensive in every area of the Empire. But those defeats, ironically, also gave impetus to progress in Genzai Bakudan. As the armed forces, particularly the Navy, were defeated in conventional combat they directed more resources to the Genzai Bakudan project as a way to regain their superiority over the Americans. There was also the sobering realization that the war was going to last much longer than anyone on the Imperial Staff had expected. Therefore a long-term project such as the atomic bomb was more feasible now.
By late 1943 the Genzai Bakudan project had gathered enough uranium for the needed experiments, no small feat by itself. It had required sending agents out throughout the Empire and commandeering ships and submarines to bring the material back.
Kuzumi remembered those difficult days: convincing men in uniform to bring back small quantities of an ore most had never heard of, while at the same time tackling the numerous other problems the project faced.
As the pile of uranium grew, they then faced the problem of separating out the U-235. Nira reported from San Francisco that Professor Lawrence was separating out about a quarter of an ounce of U-235 each day using a cyclotron. The problem for Kuzumi was that there was only one cyclotron in Japan and to convert it to producing U-235 would have meant they couldn’t use it for the other experiments they needed to conduct for the project. He turned the search elsewhere.
Kuzumi almost had to laugh now at how little they knew back then. They settled on a method called thermal diffusion, which had been perfected in Germany, which meant they had easier access to some of the information on it.
Slowly but surely, though, they overcame each obstacle. Kuzumi turned from his desk and opened his file cabinet and pulled out his wooden box of memories. Digging through he found an old photo that had stayed in Japan when he went to Korea. It showed a group of men in white coats standing in front of blackboard. The best and the brightest from all the universities in Japan, and Kuzumi, young as he was, had been in charge.
By the beginning of 1945 they were past theory and into trial and error with the different components that would make up a bomb. But the sands in the hour glass were running even quicker. The first American heavy bomber attack on Japan had occurred on the fifteenth of June 1944. In February of ‘45 the Americans captured Iwo Jima and were just over three hours from Tokyo by air. Death and destruction from above became a daily diet for the Japanese.
The loss of power hamstrung the program. B-29s destroyed the power grid feeding the Rikken, and Kuzumi was forced to face the reality that they could not finish the bomb in Japan. He went to Genoysha Taiyo and explained the situation. Taiyo made the decision. The entire project was moved to Hungnam, across the Sea of Japan, where there was plenty of power flowing from the reservoir at Chosin.