Black Wind Read online

  Black Wind

  a novel by

  F. Paul Wilson

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events

  portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real

  people or events is purely coincidental.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel could not have been completed without the generous assistance of the following people:

  Sue Burkhart

  E. Scott Royce

  Derrell Smith

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Captain Ellis M. Zacharias, General Leslie R. Groves, General Curtis LeMay, and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto are historical figures who appear as characters here. To varying degrees (least of all with Captain Zacharias, who is on record as having issued the warnings he gives in this novel, more so with Generals Groves and LeMay) I have taken dramatic license with their participation in some of the events I describe. However, I made every possible effort to keep the work historically accurate.

  In Japan, the surname is customarily given first. For the sake of clarity, I have reversed the order in Black Wind.

  Finally, no remnant of the Kakureta Kao is known to exist in modern-day Japan.

  FOREWORD

  SLATER-SAN PLANTATION

  MAUI

  This is a posthumous memoir. Long ago I gave my word not to utter a word of this story for as long as I lived. Strange to be sitting here writing this now and knowing that if someone is reading it, I'm dead.

  So be it: Here's the story of the late Frank Slater—me. It's not going to be easy to tell.

  Mostly it's about the War. Not those skirmishes in Korea and Vietnam. The Big One. WWII.

  It concerns the Kakureta Kao, a mystical order of monks who were instrumental in fueling the war and committing some ghastly atrocities during its course.

  It also concerns two Japanese—a man and a woman. The woman I have loved more than life itself. The man I grew up with, loved like a brother, and then deserted when he most needed me.

  I told you this wasn't going to be easy.

  But it will be true. It will be the truest damn thing you've ever read. Whatever else you've heard or read that contradicts what I say here is a lie. People have said otherwise but they were telling lies—maybe not deliberate lies, but repeating lies created by others who needed to safeguard their reputations or their places in history.

  This is the real truth.

  I know because I was there. And if I wasn't on the spot every moment, I got it straight from someone who was, or from documents that once belonged to the Kakureta Kao.

  This is my testament. I'm writing it to set the record straight once and for all. And I'm arranging for it to be released immediately after my death when I'm finally beyond their reach, when they can't threaten or cajole or coerce me into retracting a single word.

  They...

  Even as I dictate this, I hear that word, they, and I think to myself: You sound paranoid, Frank.

  Maybe so. Read on. Decide for yourself. It's about war and peace, about honor and betrayal, about searching for and finding your place in the world. It's about me. It's about my boyhood friend, Matsuo Okumo, and about the woman we both loved.

  It's all true.

  I swear it.

  (signed)

  Francis Xavier Slater, Jr.

  It begins with Matsuo who, as a teenager, had many troubled nights…

  PART ONE

  1926

  THE YEAR OF THE TIGER

  JULY

  SAN FRANCISCO

  A slithering sound awoke him.

  Matsuo shot up to a crouch on the futon and strained to see through the room's inky blackness.

  Not again! Please, not again!

  Out of the darkness the voices began their whispering.

  "Are you the one? The one who bears the seeds? Are you the one to die?"

  And then he saw them, limned by the faint light from the hallway, wizened, near-naked forms with bare, glistening scalps, their faces dark blanks except for an occasional shining pair of eyes. All carried knives that gleamed in the darkness.

  All except one. A tall, gaunt, hooded figure stood in the bedroom doorway. Its face too was entirely in shadow except for a pair of glowing eyes, burning softly as the creatures inched toward him along the floor.

  Some crawled, some crept, some dragged themselves along, and one writhed along the floor with a knife blade clamped between his teeth in an obscene parody of a snake. They slithered closer, their voices rising.

  "Yes! He's the one who bears the seeds! He dies! He dies now! Kill him!"

  One reared up and thrust his dagger unerringly toward Matsuo's throat—

  —and he woke up gasping, trembling, drenched with sweat.

  The dream again. For a few months it had stopped, but now it was back.

  Only a dream, he kept telling himself, but he could not escape the terror or stop his trembling. He did not want to be alone but he could not tell Nagata. He had described the dream to him once and had been told never to mention it again. It had been the first and only time he had ever seen the old samurai afraid.

  Only one thing ever helped. Matsuo crept out of his room to the small Shinto shrine where Nagata kept his daisho—his pair of samurai swords. Daisho meant "Big-Little," a perfect name for the blades.

  He placed his hand on the bigger sword, the katana, and felt his trembling cease and the terror fade. Now he felt safe. He did not know what it was about these swords, but they never failed to give him comfort. He lifted the katana—heavy, almost ten pounds—and carried it back to his room where he placed it on the futon and lay next it.

  Sleep was slow in returning, but with his hand resting on the pearl inlay of the black enameled scabbard, he knew if he was patient it would come. And when it did, it would be peaceful.

  * * *

  My folks called me Frankie. The kids called me Spot.

  On the morning of July 10, my sixteenth birthday, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at the source of my nickname. I'd done this countless times. I didn't see my ears, nose, mouth—none of which were remarkable. Nor did I see my blue eyes or sandy brown hair.

  Only that awful purple mark.

  It's known in my family as the Slater Stain. All Slater males carry it on their faces to varying degrees. The medical books call it a capillary hemangioma, which tells you nothing. Granma Slater always called it a "port wine stain," which pretty much captures the look of it. Imagine spilling a glass of burgundy onto a white linen tablecloth and letting it sit there overnight. That's a good picture of the Slater Stain.

  My father and my uncles had little ones, barely visible at their hairlines. I had all the luck. Mine was as wide as my hand and it ran from my left upper eyelid, through my hairline, to the top of my scalp.

  No words can convey the loathing I felt for that mark. I tried combing my hair over it, but my hair would never quite reach. I even went so far once as to borrow my mother's makeup powder to cover it, but the result was hideous. I would have peeled that purple skin right off my face if I hadn't known that the resulting scar would have left me even more disfigured.

  I’d cried many times over that mark. And over the nickname it earned me. It kept me from being a regular chum, one of the boys, the only thing keeping me out of Mick McGarrigle's gang. He'd like me if not for that. And so would the girls.

  And so I stood there, dreaming someone would come along and offer me a birthday wish. Anything I wanted: gold, jewels, power, fame. My heart's desire. I wouldn't have a moment's hesitation. I knew exactly what I'd wish for.

  "Frankie!"

  I recognized the voice: Matsuo, calling from outside. Matsuo never called me Spot.

  I stuck my head out
the bathroom window. I was on the second floor. Matsuo was standing on the grass over to the left below my bedroom window.

  "Hello, below!"

  "Want to come over?" he said, his amber Japanese face tilting up.

  He was smiling, but his eyes looked a little hollow, like he hadn't been sleeping too well. He was dressed like me, in a short-sleeve shirt and knee-length pants.

  I had few friends. In fact, to be honest, I had only one. And most likely I would not have been friends with Matsuo if he hadn't lived here on the grounds of my family home. I was that shy.

  "I can't today. My father's taking me sailing." The new Lightning had arrived last week and Dad was going to start teaching me how to sail.

  "Come out till he gets back."

  "Back?" I had a sinking feeling. "Where'd he go?"

  Matsuo shrugged. "I just saw him driving out."

  I ran downstairs. Mom was in the dining room where everything was mahogany and crystal, talking to Oba-san. Mom's hair was twisted up in countless tight little curlers. Her face looked tight and pinched without her hair around it. She was sitting at the long table under the chandelier, smoking a cigarette in a little ivory holder and going over a list with Oba-san.

  "Happy birthday, Master Frankie!" Oba-san said in her thickly accented English. She smiled and bowed.

  I bowed back. "Arigato."

  "Yes, darling," Mom said, wrapping an arm around my waist and giving me a quick hug. "Happy sixteenth."

  "Arigato," I said again.

  "Speak English, dear."

  "I like speaking Japanese."

  "You do Oba-san no service by speaking Japanese to her. She's in America now and wants to learn to speak English. Isn't that right, Oba-san?"

  Oba-san said, "Yes, ma'am," to Mom but winked at me.

  Oba-san was an ever-cheerful woman. The normally slimming effect of a kimono was lost on her portly frame. She was our cook as well as Matsuo's aunt. Her real name was Kimura, but Matsuo had called her Oba-san—oba being the Japanese word for "aunt"—as long as anyone could remember and that was now her name around our house.

  "Where's Dad?"

  "He had to meet with Commander Foster."

  I felt a lump swelling in my throat. "But we were supposed to go sailing."

  "Oh, darling, he didn't forget. It's just that there were some last minute problems with this new contract and he had to iron them out. I hate it when they bother him with business matters on the weekend but he had to go."

  I hated it, too. Dad was always getting called away.

  "Maybe this afternoon," I said.

  "I'm afraid it will be too late then, dear. You know we've got all these people coming for cocktails and dinner at five. There won't be time. But he'll make it up to you. You know that."

  Trouble was, I didn't know any such thing.

  "And as soon as he comes back, we'll have your birthday cake. Okay?"

  "Okay." I didn't have much choice.

  "Swell. Now you just go out and play for a while. I've got to plan tonight's menu with Oba-san."

  I waved and ran outside, determined to hide my disappointment. I had been waiting all week for today: my birthday, sailing with my dad, just the two of us on the water with no phones and no telegrams.

  I walked to the ocean edge of the yard and looked down to where the brand-new Lightning sat on rollers on the thin strip of beach fifty feet below. A sob was hiding somewhere within me. I didn't look for it. I had learned from Matsuo and Nagata that the face within is not the face for the world.

  Matsuo came running up. "You're not going sailing at all?" he said when he stopped beside me.

  I guess I still needed practice keeping my two faces separate. I shook my head, not yet ready to trust myself to speak.

  "I think you made a good decision," Matsuo said, shading his eyes as he looked out over the Pacific. "It looks choppy. Too much wind to learn sailing. Wise to wait until tomorrow when it will be calmer."

  I looked north past the deep brown stone of the Presidio to where the morning sun lit the fog flowing through the Golden Gate, then out to the misty Pacific, calm and gently rolling toward shore under an easterly breeze that couldn't have topped five knots.

  I glanced at Matsuo and had to smile. This was the truest friend a fellow could ever have.

  He had a lean face and body, dark brown eyes, and short black hair. He was my age and almost as tall. Only in the past year had I begun to stretch past him in height, and only by half an inch at that. But while I clomped along, Matsuo moved like a cat. His mind was as agile as his body and he spoke English as well as any American. And why not? He may have been born in Japan, but he grew up here. He had been speaking English almost as long as I had.

  I threw my arm over his shoulder. "What does Nagata-san have in store for us today, chum?"

  "Ikebana."

  "Again?"

  I disliked the lessons in flower arranging. They seemed sissyish. So did the origami lessons in paper folding, but at least they were fun. I say seemed sissyish because nothing Nagata did could by any stretch be called sissyish. If he wanted to teach us flower arranging and the tea ceremony and anything else, I would go along just to be in his presence and hear the tales he told.

  As we climbed the outside stairs to the rooms over the two-car garage, I peeked into the window to see if Dad had taken the Franklin. Yes, it was gone. Dad loved his new Series 11 sedan and never missed a chance to show it off to his customers. After all, it cost almost three thousand dollars.

  We reached the second floor and stopped on the landing to take off our shoes. The garage used to be a stable and on hot days like this you could still catch a whiff of horse odors drifting up from the ground floor like restless ghosts from the past. Nagata's furin hung from the eaves over the stairs and tinkled delicately in the breeze. Instead of the usual three, I noticed a fourth wind chime.

  "A new furin?"

  "Yes." Matsuo reached up and removed it from its hook. "For you," he said, extending it toward me. "For your birthday."

  A brass bell, hammered into a shape that roughly resembled a fish, hung by a fine wire from the center of a free-floating pagoda roof; suspended from the bell's clapper by another wire was an elaborate brass ideogram that caught the breeze and swung the clapper: music.

  "I made it myself. Nagata-san taught me how."

  I took it and clapped him on the shoulder with my other hand. I was touched.

  "Arigato. I know just where to hang it."

  It would go right outside my bedroom window where the breeze off the Pacific would keep it ringing.

  I followed Matsuo into the servant quarters where he lived with his aunt, Oba-san, and his uncle, the family gardener, Takijiro Nagata. Those rooms were another reality, a spacious, spartan world of bare white walls, spare, low-slung tables, and floor cushions; a world full of light and air, where shoes were left behind and bare feet trod the creaking, rush-covered straw tatami from one wall to the other; a world I had come to know and love far more than the streets of San Francisco outside.

  Nagata rose and bowed from behind the low table where he had collected a group of potted gladiolas from the nursery, an assortment of leafy plants, some twigs, a mound of earth, and three empty vases. He spoke in Japanese, slowly, to be sure I could understand.

  "I am honored you should come here on your birthday," he said. "May it be a most happy one."

  I returned the bow as he had taught me many years ago, and thanked him in Japanese.

  We all knelt at the table and Matsuo and I began to follow Nagata's lead in the arrangements. We filled the vases with moist earth, for ikebana is not an art of death, but of life. We worked with living plants in their budding stage, listening to Nagata as he spoke of letting the essentials of the art flow through our eyes and arms and fingers to the vase, to the arrangement, to see the meaning in the point of a leaf, in the curve of a branch, in the open spaces left between, to achieve harmony in the juxtaposition of color and texture and empt
iness.

  As we worked, I kept glancing at Nagata, a constant source of fascination. Such contrasts. His short thick fingers could work so delicately with the flowers and were a positive marvel with paper, which he could fold into fragile birds and animals of infinite variety. Yet they could also lift huge chunks of lava stone in Dad's garden and twist and wire the trunks and branches of small trees into exotic weathered forms. He could weep at the beauty of a falling leaf, spend hours staring into the sunset over the Pacific or contemplating the surface of a stone.

  But he had another side, one he kept hidden. One morning last spring, I was up early and spotted him in the dim light of dawn as he strode down the path to the beach at the bottom of the bluff. There, naked but for the brief white fundoshi girding his loins, his big belly protruding like a copper bowl, his face and balding scalp glistening with sweat, his arm and chest muscles bulging, he would wield his engraved katana in a dance of death. The gleaming sword would flash like lightning. He would fill the air with guttural cries as he defended himself against invisible enemies or attacked them with two-handed strokes of brutal grace that would surely have cut any flesh-and-blood opponent in half.

  I had never imagined that a single human being could be so fierce and so deadly.

  My father's gardener, the soft-spoken man who taught me paper folding and the tea ceremony and the Japanese language, was also a kind of killing machine. This stirred my imagination endlessly. I imagined that my father had secretly hired him to protect us, that by day he was a humble gardener but by the light of the moon he was a fierce samurai warrior who tirelessly prowled the grounds, keeping the household safe from whatever might threaten us. Since then I had spied on him many times.

  "Tell us about the war again," Matsuo said as we arranged our blossoms.

  "Again?" Nagata said. "Don't you ever tire of those stories?"

  "Never!" we chorused.

  He laughed and began the now-familiar tale of his part in the Japanese Third Army's assault on Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. As usual he began with the sneak attack on the Russian fleet by Japanese torpedo boats that opened the hostilities, then proceeded to recount the bayonet charge that finally won the day at enormous cost. Nagata spoke feelingly of his disdain for the rifle and how he had joined the charge armed only with his two swords.