Drone Command

“Nothing, at least for the moment.” Myers had already spoken to Lane. He recounted his conversation with President Sun. He was apologetic but firm. He wouldn’t leave Pearce behind, but Pearce needed to sit tight for now. Time was against them. They both knew Pearce would agree. But then again, time wasn’t exactly Pearce’s friend, either, Myers realized.

“What about the CIA?” Ian asked. “Pearce was one of theirs. Could they mount some kind of operation? Kidnap a Chinese agent, offer a trade?”

“Troy isn’t one of them anymore. He quit the Company, and they don’t forget that kind of thing. And when it comes to the Russian and Chinese security services, the CIA never wants to go to the mattresses.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, a Godfather reference. ‘Going to the mattresses’ means going to war. The spooks never want to play roughhouse. Spying is a gentlemen’s game despite what you see in the movies. More like hide-and-seek, not MMA cage fighting. If the CIA snatches one of theirs, then they snatch one of ours, and back and forth it escalates until some real damage gets done. Best to avoid that kind of thing, or so they believe.”

“But if Pearce is a private citizen, then shouldn’t he be afforded some kind of diplomatic protection?”

“Did you forget why he was really there? If they suspect him of spying, he won’t have any protection.”

“He’s in for a rough time of it. President Lane understands that, certainly?”

“Of course he does. If I was president, I’d be forced to leave Troy in Chinese hands, too. At least, until everything else got sorted out.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Ian conceded, as he took a sip of hot tea.

“But then again, I’m no longer the president of the United States, am I?”

“Sorry, ma’am, I’m not following you.”

“There’s a phone number I need you to get for me. It’s a long shot, but it just might work.”

FORTY-FOUR

JAPAN’S PACIFIC COAST

WADA, CHIBA PREFECTURE, JAPAN

15 MAY 2017

Twenty wide-eyed schoolchildren oohed and aahed with grim curiosity as the whalers’ sharp pole blades sliced thirty-foot-long slabs of pink blubber. Other whalers pulled back the thick strips of skin and fat with their hands as if they were peeling a twelve-ton banana, only this banana was gray, with eyes and a wry smile.

It was the annual harvest of Baird’s beaked whales in a small Japanese whaling village on the Pacific coast. The children in their bright-blue school uniforms and yellow caps chattered excitedly. Another whale had been dragged up the bloody cement ramp from the water to the open-walled slaughterhouse.

“That’s disgusting.” The forty-three-year-old vegan and nuclear physicist scrunched up her pretty California surfer-girl face.

Yamada shrugged. “It’s a four-hundred-year-old tradition.”

“Tell that to the whale.”

“I would, but I don’t think he’d hear me.” Yamada watched two of his American graduate students wolfing down fried whale morsels and guzzling ice-cold bottles of Asahi beer.

“For a world-class whale researcher, you don’t have much empathy for the poor things,” the woman said.

“I’ve devoted my life to them, but I don’t value them above people. A small local harvest like this is no threat to the species. It’s the big floating kill factories that need to be stopped.” Yamada didn’t tell her that in his radical youth he had sabotaged Soviet whaling boats.

A whaler sliced deeper into the carcass, revealing the dark meat and viscera.

“I’m think I’m gonna be sick.” The blonde researcher stepped away, looking for a bottled water to soothe her queasy stomach.

Dr. Kenji Yamada looked more like a surf bum than a world-class marine scientist, with his dark tan and long silver pony tail. His handsome face was framed by a well-groomed platinum beard. He had been born in Japan to Japanese parents who immigrated to Hawaii when he was a young child, but he was thoroughly American and a naturalized citizen. His parents, now long since dead, were buried in a lonely Japanese cemetery on Kauai. They raised him proudly steeped in Japanese culture, tradition, and language, all three of which he closely embraced in his middle age. He was their only child, and he was childless — an unspoken disappointment for his parents, who wished for grandchildren to tend their graves and join them in the next life.

An old fisherman shuffled up with a whale fin neatly wrapped in folded paper. Yamada bowed his gratitude. The two men conversed happily in Japanese. Yamada felt the warm sun on his face, smelled the sea and the salt air. The life of the happy little village coursed in his blood. For a moment it felt like home.

* * *

Yamada listened to the soft snoring of his vegan physicist sound asleep next to him and the water chucking against the cabin bulkhead.