Red Shark

At the station in the village, Scott bought a ticket to Tokyo. Outside on the platform, he recognized the man he’d seen on the train from Tokyo that morning. He had on his black raincoat but carried no luggage.

Scott kept his distance. When the train arrived, he tried to blend in with the passengers boarding coaches. The man boarded the coach behind the one Scott rode in and didn’t appear again until the train pulled into Tokyo. Scott joined the crush rushing from the train for cabs and buses, then tried to lose the man in the crowded station. He thought he had but spotted him again, this time at the end of the taxi queue Scott had joined.

Scott broke out of line and blended into a group of British tourists waiting to board a bus. Screened by the tourists, he watched the man standing in the taxi queue move up as the line shortened. When a tour bus pulled up to the curb to load, Scott broke away and ducked behind the bus. Shielded by its bulk, he dashed across three taxi ranks and jumped into a cab that had just rolled to a stop at the end of one of the ranks. Scott ordered the startled white-capped-and-gloved driver to get moving hayaku — fast.

The man in the raincoat waiting on line tore after Scott. Amid cries of buta! — pig! — from onlookers embarrassed by a public display of rude manners by a Japanese, the man shouldered his way between a Western couple waiting with bags at the head of the line and bolted for the next taxi.

As Scott’s cab sped from the station into traffic, he looked back and saw the man in the raincoat tussling with the Westerner, who received for his trouble a vicious chop that smashed him to the pavement.

Scott turned and faced forward. He knew it wouldn’t take long for the man in the black raincoat to track him down.

Scott’s taxi pulled up in front of a small, run-down fuck-hotel and bar located over a fortune-teller’s shop in the heart of Tokyo’s pink district in Kabukicho. The driver said, “Number-one place. You like.”

The hotel and shop were wedged between the Art Nouveau, a sex club, and a bar called Bottoms Up. The rest of the block was shoulder to shoulder hostess bars, peep shows, and live porno theaters.

The Japanese who managed the hotel and bar introduced himself as Sammy Shin. He showed Scott a room on the top floor. More rooms like it opened off a balcony wrapped around a dreary courtyard containing a lifeless ailanthus tree.

“Private, very private,” Sammy Shin assured him, pointing to the room. “Many beautiful girl to fuck. You bring here.” He grinned, showing off brown, jagged teeth.

The room smelled of old urine and sweaty sex, and next door, Scott heard a couple rutting away. Worn tatami covered the floor; a stained quilt lay folded on a dirty futon. A small table and two chairs with woven sisal seats stood in a corner. A ceramic lantern, the room’s only source of light, hung from the wall over the table. An undersized kotatsu provided heat. Scott decided that the place was perfect.

He stepped out on the balcony to pay Sammy for the room. Across the courtyard two couples emerged from adjacent stalls and split up: two teenaged whores waved good-bye to their customers, middle-aged salarymen.

“Many beautiful girl to fuck,” Sammy beamed.

“Yeah, many beautiful girls to fuck,” Scott mimicked, and handed over some yen.

Sammy started for the stairs, but Scott grabbed his quilted jacket. “Not so fast, Sammy-san. I want you to show me something.”

The voice booming at Scott over the sleeved cell phone from Virginia was clipped and tight, a sure sign that Radford was not pleased with what Scott had told him. A grunt was all he allowed when he was told of Higashi’s murder and Fumiko’s kidnapping. Then he said, “That BX warhead, nothing new there, we’ve tracked rumors that it exists, never been able to prove it. Same with Tokugawa churning out mini-nukes for the JSDF, paying for them out of his own pocket. Rumors. This Professor Kida you talked to, Ms. Kida’s father, he show you any documents to back up his claims?”

“No, General, there wasn’t time, we had to get out of there.”

Radford grunted. “Arming the NKs with a bunch of mini-nukes is a hell of a stretch. You’ll have to do better than that, Scott.”

“Sir, why would they have trucked the warheads to Najin, if not to deliver them to Vladivostok, to that electronics plant owned by Meji Industries?”

“Why? To put them out of our reach across the border in Russia, that’s why. But that won’t keep us from going in there and taking the bunch of them out.”

“I assume, General, that you know exactly where they are.”