Nishin wasn’t worried about Cyclone or Forest or 1-24. That was Nakanga’s province. Nishin’s orders were to find out who the American was and who he worked for. He wasn’t glad he hadn’t killed Okomo as he headed toward the Japan Center, but he did realize that he had let emotion almost cause him to commit actions that now would have been detrimental to the success of the mission.
He still needed the Yakuza, much as he didn’t want to admit it. The same guard was waiting in the restaurant foyer and without a word he led Nishin up to the enclosed roof after searching him.
Okomo did not look like he had spent the night at sea and fought a pitched battle with North Korean commandos. He was seated at the head of his table, underlings lining the table on either side. “You would be dead right now if your friend Nakanga was not so efficient. The money is in my account. What do you want? Our business is done.”
“I need information.”
Okomo just stared at him. There were glares from the others around the table.
“Oyabun,” Nishin reluctantly added.
Okomo was still silent.
“The North Koreans got their guns from an American. He met them at Fort Point to make the exchange, but they did not pay him. They tried to kill him, but he escaped. I need to find out about this American, Oyabun.” Nishin didn’t add the information that the American had gone down in the Am Nok Sung. That would pique the Yakuza’s interest too much. “We will pay.”
“Of course you will pay,” Okomo said.
Nishin stared into the flat black eyes of the old man. He tensed his stomach muscles, feeling the reassuring presence of the ice scraper poking into the flesh. The old man was dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than Nakanga knew.
“I will inform you when I find something out.” Okomo waved a hand dismissing him. Once Nishin was gone, Okomo slowly walked back to the rear elevator to make his report.
It was hot down in the basement of Wellman Hall. Lake’s shirt was soaked with sweat as he hauled^ boxes to the old wood desk that Harmon was seated at. She was scanning documents from January 1945 on, searching for any other reference to the code words Cyclone or Forest. Since Lake couldn’t read the Japanese text, he was reduced to being the errand boy. He didn’t mind. It gave his mind a chance to relax and unwind from the stress of the past several days. And he could also watch her without her knowing. He found himself mesmerized by the way the scant lighting reflected off her face and glowed through her hair. Her eyes flickered back and forth over the paper, then she glanced up, catching him watching and smiled, and he looked away. She returned to reading.
Lake was also glad to be in the basement because it meant his cellular phone wouldn’t ring. He had now been out of touch with Feliks and the Ranch well past when he should have checked in.
As he deposited another box on the desk, Harmon looked up. “What happened to your neck?”
Lake was surprised at her directness. People rarely asked, not so much because of politeness, but because Lake tried to always project an image that discouraged people from asking him questions.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“I can listen and read at the same time. You have nothing else to do,” she added.
Lake sat down on a metal folding chair on the other side of the desk. “I’ll make it a short story. It happened a while back. Do you remember when that plane with all those troops coming from the peacekeeping mission in the Sinai crashed in Gander and they were all killed?”
Harmon nodded. “Yes. The official cause, if I remember rightly, was ice on the wings.”
“Yeah, that was the official story, but there were some who thought it was a bomb that destroyed the plane. And someone in our government thought they knew who might have planted that bomb. And someone in the chain of command felt that action in retaliation ought to be taken.”
“Revenge?” Harmon asked, shutting one file and opening another.
“No, not really. More along the lines of keeping the scales even. You hurt me, I hurt you. With the logical extension that the other guy then will think twice before hurting you again. So I was on the team that was picked to do the hurting back.”
“Were you with the same organization that you’re with now?” Harmon asked.
“No. Back then I was in the SEALs. Naval Special Warfare Unit Two, stationed in Coronado, California. They selected a squad from my platoon. Six men. I was the leader. We trained with some Agency guy who then picked two of us: me and my chief NCO, Rick Masters. The CIA man then briefed us. Our mission was to infiltrate into a certain country, which I will leave unnamed — and kill the man who had supposedly been the mastermind behind the bomb plot.”
Harmon arched her eyebrows. “Did they have any proof?”
“They didn’t show us any,” Lake said dryly. “So the government…” Harmon’s voice trailed off.
“Yes,” Lake said, “the U.S. government really does shit like that. How do you think we’ve managed to keep terrorism from our shores for so long? You don’t scare the bad guys by being nice. You’ scare them by being meaner than they are.”
“So did you succeed in being mean?” Harmon asked. She had stopped reading. All her attention was on Lake.
“Yes.”
“And the scar?”
Lake had been debriefed about the mission, but he had never told anyone outside of official channels about it. He wasn’t sure why he had even answered her question about the scar. This entire mission seemed out-of-sorts. Too many pieces that didn’t seem to fit other than the fact that Lake had stumbled across them. He wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. The events of the last several days he could handle piecemeal as they came up, but the cumulative effect was overwhelming. Being here in this dark archive basement seemed like a refuge from all that. Especially with Peggy Harmon sitting across from him.
He knew there was no evidence to prove what he was saying. It was just like everything else he had told her. And he felt a need to talk, to let out the darkness that had been in him for so many years.
“Rick and I infiltrated the target country after locking out of a submarine,” he said.
“Lockout?”
“The sub stayed submerged,” Lake said. “Rick and I went in to the escape hatch, it filled with water, then we i opened up the outer hatch and swam away. We were using rebreathers so we could stay under for quite a while and didn’t have any bubbles coming up to the surface. We swam in, landed, cached our gear, and made our way to the target.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It sounds simple, but it wasn’t,” Lake acknowledged. “The swell was almost six feet at the surface and our rebreathers required that we stay within ten feet of the surface. That meant we caught the surface effect quite severely. It was pitch black and we were fighting a cross shore current. We were lucky to make it ashore at the right place. We had to cross the beach, cut through a fence-they have a fence along the entire shoreline there — and move inland a couple of hundred meters before we could hide our rebreathers.”
Lake remembered the adrenaline rush more than anything else. “I was only five years out of—” He paused. He couldn’t tell her about the Naval Academy. That would give her a way of finding out who he was. And just as quickly as he thought it, he felt a sharp twist of disgust with himself and the life he was leading. Always the deception. “I was only five years in the Navy. This was my first live mission. Rick had been shot at before — he was a twenty-year man, so I followed his lead, even though I was the ranking man.” That was an understatement, Lake knew. Rick Masters had been his mentor for two years, ever since he had joined the SEALs. They’d taught Lake a lot in SEAL school at Coronado, but the real learning had begun the first day he’d shaken the hand of the gri/zled old veteran who was the team’s senior noncommissioned officer. In the SEALs the man with the most experience commanded, not the man with the most rank on his shoulder. It made the unit better.