Page 138 of Clive Cussler Ghost Soldier

“In Vietnam, the feds deployed a weather weapon called Operation Popeye,” Max said. “But that was only to extend the monsoon season with cloud seeding to slow the Vietcong supply lines.”

Juan sighed with frustration. The Vendor had dealt them a couple of bad hands and last night’s lightning barrage nearly knocked them out of the game. With no other leads to go on, the smart play would be for them to get to a repair yard as quickly as possible so theOregonwould be ready to fight if and or when another clue came their way.

But Cabrillo couldn’t shake the feeling that the “smart play” was still a retreat, and that didn’t sit well with him at all.

He was weighing all of his options when his radio crackled.

“Chairman, do you read me?”

Juan keyed his mic. “Five by five, Hali. What do you need?”

“Eric Stone wants to see you in the conference room. He says it’s urgent.”

71

Cabrillo marched into the conference room and fell into one of the chairs. Max and Murph did the same. Eric was already seated in front of a laptop and projecting Juan’s Midjourney-generated image of the Vendor onto one of the wall screens. It looked just like an actual color photograph of the man, but it was entirely fictional, a product of Juan’s prodigious memory married to digital artistry.

“What’ve you got for us, Stoney?” Juan asked.

“That’s the picture you and the Magic Shop came up with for the Vendor. We’ve scoured every social media source we know, but couldn’t find a match. Not in company records, school yearbooks, nothing. If he ever had a digital shadow, he found a way to completely erase it.”

“Another dead end?”

Eric smiled. “Until we found this.”

He pulled up a black-and-white image from old film stock, grainy and damaged. The man’s face was bearded, his almond-shaped eyes covered by round, steel-rimmed glasses from the period. Stone had wire-framed the digitized image, cropped it, and re-angled the man’s face to match the approximate profile angle of the Vendor.

“Whoa,” Max said. “Two peas in a pod.”

“Just wait.” Eric punched a couple of keys. The Midjourney image was made slightly transparent, then Stone superimposed it upon the black-and-white image. They were practically identical, down to the arrogant, thin-lipped smile.

“Unless our nemesis is a time traveler, I’m guessing that’s a relative,” Murph said. “Though I kinda like the idea we’re looking at Dr. Who.”

Juan leaned forward on his elbows studying the image.

“Who is it?”

“That’s Dr. Yoshio Mitomo. He was head of the virology lab inside of Unit 731.”

“The infamous prison camp the Japanese ran in Manchuria during the war,” Max said. “The human experiments they did there were beyond the pale. Worse than Auschwitz.”

“And some of those experiments were conducted on American soldiers, especially airmen,” Murph said. “They demonized our bomber pilots as war criminals unworthy of humane treatment.”

Max stabbed a finger at Mitomo’s image. “That’s a bona fide war criminal. A firing squad was too good for him.”

“Unfortunately not,” Eric said. “We captured Mitomo after the war. We knew what he was up to at Unit 731. But the OSS swept him up in Operation Paperclip. Offered him immunity in exchange for his services.”

“They should’ve hanged him,” Max said.

“Truman was more worried about world revolution than international justice,” Juan said. “We were looking for every material and technological advantage to stop the spread of Stalin’s evil. We were in a race to capture as many German and Japanese scientists as we could before the Russians scooped them up. It was a kind of arms race, only it was about capturing the brains that would develop the next generation of warfare.”

“I understand it,” Max said. “But I still don’t like it. We should’ve lined them all up against the wall.”

“Then we might not have gone to the moon,” Murph said. “Wernher von Braun practically built the Apollo program. Same story on theRussian side. Every Soviet space rocket should’ve had ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on its backside.”

“Enough with the history lessons,” Juan said. “What happened to Mitomo?”

“He disappears from any official record after 1946. Well, except for this.” Eric pulled up a black-and-white picture of a baby Japanese girl.