Page 22 of Daikon

The American bomb contained sixty-four kilograms of uranium, so that meant a theoretical energy potential of more than 100,000 tons.

What did a 100,000-ton pile of conventional explosives look like?

Would it even be possible to detonate such a mass all at once?

In reality, an atomic explosion would not be nearly so efficient as to realize its entire energy potential.

But if only a half, a quarter, even a tenth of the atoms in the uranium rings were to fission…

Kan slowly shook his head. “I believe it would be much more powerful than that.”

Lieutenant Commander Koreeda rescinded the quarantine order, releasing Kan and the three navy men from the barracks.

Seaman Wada was moved to the base infirmary for what was hoped would be his recovery.

His nausea was subsiding, but his affected hand appeared to be getting worse, swelling even more and turning bright red.

Nakamura went off to find some ice to ease the pain it was causing his comrade.

Keizo Kan’s first concern was to prepare the uranium rings to be safely transported. “We need lead,” he said to Petty Officer Yagi. “We need to place the two ring assemblies into separate boxes lined with lead.”

Yagi led the way across the compound toward a grouping of ramshackle warehouses alongside the river.

They passed the assembled ranks of kaiten pilots, now standing at ease in front of their commander as he delivered a speech.

They were all young, aged eighteen to perhaps twenty-two, every one of them robust-looking and brimming with health.

“We underestimated the enemy’s will,” Kan heard their commander saying.

“We thought he wouldn’t fight so hard. Well, he fights hard, doesn’t he?

We know that now. He loves his country and he has his own national spirit, just like you.

So you must strengthen your Japanese spirit.

You must love your country even more and fight even harder! ”

“Wada doesn’t look good,” said Yagi. “Do you think he’ll recover?”

Kan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

They continued on.

“Gen-shi ba-ku-dan,” Yagi murmured the syllables thoughtfully. “So that’s what it is.”

Kan turned on him and stopped. “You weren’t supposed to hear that. Your ears are too sharp.”

The rebuke made no impression on Yagi at all. “So how does it work?” he pressed. “?‘Atomic.’ What does that mean?”

Kan raised his hands to his head in exasperation. “This is supposed to be a secret!”

Yagi thrust his face at him, threatening. “Listen. I’ve sweated over that thing for days. And now one of my men is sick. Don’t tell me it’s a secret!”

They stood nose to nose. Kan managed to maintain his indignation for three seconds before backing down. He had already disobeyed Colonel Sagara’s orders in revealing what he did to Commander Koreeda. The damage was already done, if the colonel found out.

“All right,” he said. “But please, be discreet. Let’s not even call it a bomb. Can we do that?”

Yagi shrugged. “We can call it whatever you want. With the outer casing off, it looks like a big horse cock. How about that? Let’s call it the Horse Cock.”

Kan gave him an annoyed look.

“The Eggplant, then,” said Yagi. He snapped his fingers. “No, the Daikon. It looks like a big black daikon radish. Let’s call it the Daikon.”

The word gave Kan a pang of unease. He didn’t know why. He let out a weary sigh and nodded.

“All right,” said Yagi. “It’s the Daikon. Now how does it work?”

They continued on across the compound, Kan explaining in whispers the basic concept of atomic fission and his deductions of how the… Daikon was intended to function.

“So it is a gun barrel,” said Yagi. “To fire the two parts of uranium together. And all those other parts, the wiring, the electrical units—that’s the triggering mechanism? All that just to detonate it automatically? Remotely?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Kan. “The—” A final sigh of capitulation. “The Daikon was probably designed to explode at a certain altitude above the ground. Multiple systems to safeguard against failure.”

Yagi was shaking his head. “Now that’s what I don’t understand.”

“Detonating it above the ground? Because that would cause maximum damage.”

“No,” said Yagi. “I mean making it so complex. Just to save the lives of one or two men.”

They had come to the wharf and turned toward a grouping of rust-streaked, warehouse-like buildings.

There were five training kaiten moored in the oil-filmed water, their tops painted white.

Another thirty, painted black for combat, were sitting on chocks in the tin-roofed structure Yagi led the way into.

It was Kan’s first good look at the unusual weapon.

It was fifteen meters long and one meter wide and had a hatch and periscope sticking up at the center—the Navy’s Model 93 torpedo, elongated just enough to accommodate a man.

“Get off your lazy asses!” roared Yagi, making Kan jump. “Get back to work!”

Knots of men leaped up from the corners where they had been idling and threw themselves back at a half-dozen partly assembled torpedoes.

“One-point-six-ton warhead,” Yagi said with obvious pride, noting Kan’s interest. “It can lift a destroyer right out of the water. Break its back. But the welding—”

He raised his voice so that it boomed through the building. “We’re going to fix every leak!”

A dozen voices affirmed in unison, “Hai!”

“We’re going to send our comrades off in perfect weapons!”

“Hai!”

“Orita! Watanabe!” barked Yagi.

Two of the seamen broke away from the kaiten they were working on and reported to Yagi on the double, arms tight to their sides.

Yagi handed them the sketch Kan had made. “Ten-millimeter lead sheeting. Cut these pieces. Exact. Understand?”

The seamen hurried off. Kan’s gaze returned to the kaiten.

“It’s hard to imagine a man could fit inside,” he said.

“Getting in isn’t so hard,” said Yagi. “It’s staying in that’s the problem. Not many can stand it for more than just a few minutes. Too claustrophobic. Those men out there…”—he gestured toward the parade ground—“they have to be able to sit in one of these things for hours.”

Kan approached the nearest kaiten and began walking around it. Even elevated on chocks, it came only to his chest.

Yagi lifted the hatch. “Go on, take a look.”

Kan peered down into the cockpit. There was a backrest but no seat.

The pilot sat directly on the hull, surrounded by valves and tubes and hard metal edges, the periscope eyepiece a handbreadth from his face.

It was so much worse than what he had imagined for Tetsuo, one of his nephews, who had crashed his explosives-packed aircraft into an American ship off Saipan.

Kan had congratulated his sister in the approved manner on the glorious sacrifice of her son after hearing the news.

She had thanked him with a grateful smile and tears in her eyes.

“How does the pilot see?” he asked. “Surely the periscope doesn’t work underwater.”

“He takes a sighting on the target through the periscope on the surface,” explained Yagi.

“After he dives for the final approach, it’s all done blind.

Underwater navigation. Pure calculation.

And he’s all alone, with only a flashlight.

” He paused, then added: “It takes a special kind of crazy fool to do that.”

Kan noted something in the petty officer’s voice.

A hint of reverential emotion? Looking down into the kaiten, he felt nothing but horror.

At least Tetsuo had seen his target as he made the final dive in his plane.

A kaiten pilot, steering blindly toward a moving target—what was his actual chance of success?

They proceeded to a jumble of wood piled against the back wall and selected some scraps and odd lengths for the boxes.

As they began marking and sawing out pieces, Kan’s mind went back to his telephone call to the War Ministry in Tokyo.

He had spoken cryptically and the line had been bad, but Colonel Sagara had grasped his message—and also his meaning when Kan cautiously inquired about his wife.

“That person is in—” Sagara snapped, the last word lost in a burst of static. “Now there’s no reason for you to bring up this matter again. Do you hear me?”

Kan hadn’t dared ask the colonel to repeat himself.

Had he said Noriko was in Iidabashi? It had sounded something like that, but Kan hoped he was mistaken.

Iidabashi was just north of the Imperial Palace in what was left of downtown Tokyo—a dangerous place to be held, already thoroughly bombed.

But then Sagara’s next sentence: Now there’s no reason for you to bring up this matter again.

Did that not imply that he would be satisfied with the action being taken?

As Kan pondered the phone call and Sagara’s words, his feeling began to gravitate slightly toward hope.

Yagi was awash with sweat now as he worked with the saw. Kan, looking on, felt the fingers of his right hand—the hand that had absorbed the heat coming off the uranium ring Wada had dropped. A definite tenderness was apparent on the tips of the index and middle digits, as if they had been burned.

He looked at his fingers. Only a slight redness.

He checked his watch. Twenty-three hours since exposure.

He took out his notebook and jotted this down.

That person is in…

Where was Noriko?

He prayed she was safe.