Page 26 of Daikon

“The War Minister’s order,” stammered the clerk. “His written order. If I could just see it.”

Sagara’s astonishment turned to outrage. He climbed down out of the truck and screamed into the clerk’s face: “What is your name!”

The terrified man stiffened to attention. “Ensign Nobuo Yamada!”

“Ensign Nobuo Yamada! Are you questioning me?”

“No, Colonel. But if I could just see the order—”

“Is an ensign, an ensign, questioning a lieutenant colonel in His Majesty’s Imperial Army? A lieutenant colonel acting on orders from the Minister of War?”

“No, Colonel!”

“Well then, Ensign Yamada, raise the gate! If you value your well-being and the well-being of your family, raise the gate!”

The clerk, his face a mask of misery and confusion, looked from Sagara back to the administrative building with the XO locked inside, then back at Sagara glaring at him like a ferocious temple statue of the thunder god Raijin.

The last of his resistance crumbled. He stepped away from the truck and motioned to the sentry to raise the gate.

The drive back to Yuu Airfield took forty-five minutes, Colonel Sagara wincing and rubbing his temple as he urged the driver to maximum speed. It was clear to Kan beside him that the colonel was in some sort of pain, perhaps brought on by the stress.

“We take only what’s essential!” Sagara instructed when they arrived at the airstrip. “The rest can follow later!”

Loading the two-ton gun assembly onto the Mitsubishi transport was a challenge.

A trolley hoist from one of the camouflaged hangars was used to move it to the cargo door of the aircraft, but getting it aboard took sheer muscle, the four soldiers and Yagi and the three-man flight crew all pushing and pulling and straining as Sagara called out for haste.

In the distance, the muffled sound of waves beat on the shore.

“Too heavy,” said the pilot, wiping the sweat from his brow.

“The soldiers will be left behind,” Sagara said. “They can travel back separately.”

The pilot shook his head, doubtful.

“Did you fuel the plane?” asked Sagara.

“Fully fueled,” said the pilot.

“Well, pump half of it out. We can refuel at Itami.”

The pilot conveyed the order to the ground crew. The fuel cart was wheeled back alongside the plane. Men started pumping by hand.

Kan climbed into the aircraft to unpack the uranium rings. Leaving the lead-lined boxes behind would save an additional fifty kilos. He divided the front and rear ring assemblies in two and secured them at opposite ends of the compartment, held in place with wire so they couldn’t be moved.

Something caught his eye as he emerged from the plane.

It was a trail of condensation, so high that the aircraft tracing it across the sky was a silvery speck.

The excited cry of his daughter Aiko came into his mind as he paused to gaze skyward: “B-san! B-san!” When B-29s started appearing singly like this over Tokyo in daytime they were assumed to be observation planes and did not instill fear.

Children like Aiko would point and dance about and shout, “B-san! B-san!” It was like spotting a rare bird.

He turned to see Colonel Sagara approaching. He had something in his hand.

It was a small packet of headache tablets. Sagara had secured them from the airfield administration building to ease the throbbing that had started inside his skull back at Hikari. He shook out four tablets and sourly chewed them as he came up to Kan.

“The soldiers stay,” he announced. “And they’re pumping off fuel, so we should be able to manage.”

He offered Kan a cigarette and lit one for himself, feeling tense but elated.

He had successfully decoyed Lieutenant Commander Koreeda away from Hikari and had dealt with his XO in an efficient manner.

Perfect, really. The corporal striking Lieutenant Miyata in the head with his rifle butt before they left—that was unfortunate but not a problem.

The man was going to raise the alarm and had to be silenced.

He had slipped and fallen, cracked his head on the desk.

That’s what Sagara would say. And his account would be corroborated by the corporal.

For Miyata to claim otherwise would be evidence that his wits had been addled by the accidental, self-administered blow to the head.

And in the meantime the plane was loaded with his prize. He was almost under way.

The right side of his mouth curved up in a lopsided smile.

Kan observed it. The colonel seemed in good spirits. If there was ever a time to take the gamble, to act on the idea that had been forming, it was now.

“Sagara-chūsa,” he said, hesitant, his eyes on the ground. “When we spoke on the telephone, the line wasn’t clear. You said where my wife was being held, but I couldn’t quite catch it.”

Sagara didn’t respond. His gaze had fallen on Petty Officer Yagi, sitting in the shade of the nearby hangar, his work done.

“The petty officer there,” he said. “He was in charge of the detail that recovered the bomb? That identified the uranium inside it?”

“Yes, he’s the man,” Kan replied, glad to give Yagi his due recognition. “Yagi-heisō was also very helpful with my investigation.”

“What have you told him?”

Kan suddenly grew cautious. He shook his head. “Nothing, Colonel. I told him nothing.”

Sagara’s eyes narrowed as he regarded Yagi.

“Yagi-heisō!” he called out.

The petty officer looked up. He flicked away his cigarette, rose, and walked over. Sagara’s right hand casually dropped to the polished leather of his holster.

Kan noticed this with rising alarm. Yagi had been a witness to Sagara’s actions back at Hikari. He was a loose end. Could the colonel really be that ruthless?

Yagi came up and stood at attention.

“Yagi-heisō,” Sagara said, regarding him. “Kan-sensei here tells me you’ve been very helpful.”

Yagi stood with his eyes straight ahead. Sagara considered him for another moment, then started looking around, his hand still on his holster.

He casually unsnapped the flap securing his pistol.

“Sagara-chūsa,” Kan blurted out, “I’ll need assistance.”

“And you’ll have it,” said Sagara, his hand now on his gun.

“I’d like Yagi-heisō. He has been extremely capable and—”

A burst of bluish light filled the whole sky, as if a cosmic flashbulb had been set off in the heavens—a flash so intense, so powerful, it seemed to explode inside Keizo Kan’s brain.

It swept across the airfield with a burning heat that made his skin prickle, then retreated inside a colossal cloud that was rising along the coast to the north, a luminous, roiling mass of yellows and oranges enveloping a beating heart of purples and reds.

Kan and Colonel Sagara, PO Yagi, the soldiers, the flight crew—all turned to stare open-mouthed at the writhing, billowing apparition.

It rose higher and higher until it was passing through the scattered wisps of low-lying cloud, its living colors gradually fading to dead gray and dead slate, dead sand and dead brown.

A halo momentarily materialized around the top, intensified to a beautiful violet, then faded.

Thirty seconds had passed.

The airfield became a beehive of activity, personnel hurrying around.

Doors were pushed back all along the low line of camouflaged hangars, revealing fighter aircraft, Kawasaki Ki-45s, “Dragon Slayers,” hidden inside.

Army Air Force pilots, pulling on jackets, goggles, and leather helmets, raced to their planes hoping for orders to take off.

“The fuel dump at Iwakuni!” one of them called to his comrades.

“They must have bombed the fuel dump at Iwakuni!”

A minute had passed.

Cawing overhead. Kan looked up. A crow flapped drunkenly by and heavily landed, half falling from the air. It staggered, teetered, lost its balance, fell over. It struggled to get back on its feet, flapping its wings in the dust.

The cloud was kilometers high now, its top spreading out as the atmosphere thinned, giving the whole the appearance of a mushroom. There was no more inner luminescence. It was entirely gone. The column extending down to the earth was beginning to bend. The cloud was starting to tip.

Two minutes had passed.

A deep, rumbling thunder washed over them from the north, a slowly building deluge drowning out the sound of the waves.

Volume increasing, it overwhelmed the air with its presence until the windows in the airfield buildings were sympathetically buzzing, then the buildings themselves, then the ground underneath.

Kan and Sagara and Yagi and all the men bearing witness could feel the vibrations rising through their bodies.

They could feel it in their extremities, feel it in their bones.

Two minutes. It had taken two minutes for the sound to reach them.

With dawning realization, balanced on the edge of a dreadful abyss, Keizo Kan seized on the number, calculations unfolding on an almost subconscious level.

The speed of sound at sea level was 340 meters per second, a third of a kilometer per second, a kilometer in three seconds. So a two-minute delay…

“Forty kilometers,” he whispered, gazing in awe at the cloud.

“Hiroshima,” Colonel Sagara said.