Page 57 of Daikon

THIRTY-THREE

THE TAKEOFF HAD BEEN FLAWLESS .

The brakes were released. The Renzan started rolling.

The additional weight of fuel the aircraft was carrying had been more than offset by the removal of armor.

Onda could feel the difference in the way they were gathering speed.

He kept the plane on the ground until most of the runway was used up, then pulled back on the yoke and took to the air.

Behind the flight deck, on the far side of the catwalk, Colonel Sagara sat alone in the radio operator’s compartment, facing the guillotine switch.

It had been a humiliating struggle to get into his flight suit, Onda assisting.

And the manhandling that had been required to get him up into the plane had been worse.

But he would need only his right hand to detonate the bomb.

He grimly regarded his left hand, the fingers curled up and useless. His body was broken. He knew it. Was this why fate had directed him onto the plane? Because operating the switch was the only thing he was still physically able to do?

The compartment tilted, the Renzan coming onto a new heading.

Sagara closed his eyes and felt himself move with the plane, a part of the machine.

He contemplated the gasoline flowing through the lines, feeding the engines, the aviation gas he had fortuitously acquired from Army Fuel Headquarters, refined from the roots of pine trees.

How appropriate it was that they were relying on the indomitable pine, the eternal pine, for their flight.

The literal essence of the earth, pine tree roots dug from the soil of the homeland, would power them across the ocean to destroy San Francisco.

The Renzan leveled out and continued its climb. The drone of the engines rose to a frequency that caused the door of the cabinet on Sagara’s left to begin sympathetically buzzing. It was closed but had not been properly latched.

The noise gradually intruded into the colonel’s thoughts.

He opened his eyes. His gaze fell on a pair of pliers sitting on the side of the radio operator’s desk before him.

Fibers were clinging to its jaws. They matched the asbestos insulation on the wire leading to the guillotine switch.

The scientist Kan and the navy man, the Korean, must have left the pliers sitting there after installing the switch.

“Careless,” he muttered.

He snatched up the pliers with his good hand and turned to stow them in the cabinet, alongside what he glimpsed was a flashlight. He closed and latched the door to stop the buzzing.

He settled back in his seat. The cabinet was silent.

That’s when it hit him.

He shouted through the interphone to the cockpit: “Onda! Did you check for sabotage?”

A crackle in Sagara’s headphones. Onda’s voice, confused: “Sabotage, Colonel?”

“The bomb!” Sagara roared back. “Did you check the bomb!”

The flight engineer, Lieutenant Otani, was sent back from the flight deck.

Sagara had already decided that it would be pointless to try to check the bomb itself.

They were not familiar with its inner workings, and in any event there was no way to get at it, given the lack of space inside the bomb bay.

But there would have been no space for Keizo Kan or Petty Officer Yagi to get at it either.

If they had committed an act of sabotage before deserting, the triggering wire was the more likely target.

It would have been easy to access. It might have been cut.

Otani took the flashlight from the cabinet and began examining the wire. The portion from the guillotine switch down to the floor was intact.

He opened the door at the front of the compartment, letting in a flood of cold air, and stepped onto the catwalk. He directed the flashlight beam down into the darkness, tracing the wire on its snaking course. He could see no obvious sign of a break.

He climbed down off the catwalk and followed the wire.

The Renzan was over the ocean now, heading east at 6,000 meters. It had already picked up a powerful tailwind, allowing Captain Onda to level out at a lower altitude than planned and still stay on schedule, giving Otani in the frigid bomb bay time to examine the wire leading up from the bomb.

“I’ve found something.”

Otani’s voice coming through the interphone was quaking with the cold. He had connected his headset in the bomb bay, but there was no rheostat there to plug into to heat his flight suit.

“A dial of some sort,” he was saying. “It’s been spliced into the wire. It looks like a thermometer.”

Onda’s voice, anxious: “Can you remove it?”

A pause.

“It’s very cold,” said Otani. “Difficult using my hands.”

Colonel Sagara in the radio operator’s compartment was rocking back and forth with the tension. This was the moment. This was his purpose. This was why fate had led him onto the plane.

He spoke into the interphone: “Be careful. Don’t touch it. Describe it to me.”

A pause.

“A nail has been inserted into the dial face,” replied Otani, his voice shaking. “One end of the wire has been attached to the nail, the other end to the needle.” Another pause. “The needle is almost touching.”

Sagara’s mind was racing. An image coalesced: the wire routed through the thermometer, the gap between the needle and the nail, the needle advancing as the temperature fell. When they touched, that would complete the circuit. The atomic bomb would detonate… if the triggering switch was already on.

His eyes went to the guillotine switch.

He reached out to it and lifted the locking bracket.

He hesitated.

“Otani, don’t let the needle touch the—”

He was engulfed by a bright light.