The Phoenix Tree. Jon Cleary
me say something, commander. I grew up in this country as a virtual outsider, no matter how much I loved Mom and apple pie and the American flag. You might almost say I was like a Jew in Nazi Germany. I had to be sharp to stay in step. You got no idea the number of times I stumbled, especially as a kid, and fell out of line. It was a question of survival – being sharp, I mean.’
Embury, Irvine and even Reilly looked suddenly sympathetic; as if, up till now, they had looked only in Caucasian mirrors. Reilly also looked disconcerted, as if he had not realized there had been another, earlier war going on.
‘It’ll be a question of survival in Japan,’ said Embury. ‘We won’t try to hide that from you. You’ll be our filter. Minato will give the information to you as his control and you’ll assess it before passing it on. We hope to teach you how to assess that information before we send you off. Our main hope is that when we get Minato back into Japan, he’ll go into Naval Intelligence on the staff of Admiral Tajiri. After six years in the field they’re not going to waste his experience.’
‘There’s an awful lot of hope going on, sir. What hope do I have that I’ll come out of this alive?’
‘Oh, about fifty-fifty – we hope.’
Okada was surrounded by smiles. He felt suddenly angry; then he made himself relax. Getting angry with these men would get him nowhere; once again he was the outsider. Then his curiosity, if not yet his patriotism, began to get the better of him. There were drawbacks to having been trained as a lawyer; one enjoyed listening to argument.
‘After I’ve assessed the information, how do I get it back to you? It seems to me that could be pretty hopeless, too.’
‘David?’ Embury looked at Irvine.
Irvine stood up, as if now that he had been invited to speak he had to stretch himself. He was about height, goodlooking but balding, with dark, and darkly amused, eyes; come Armageddon, he would treat it as the final, inevitable joke and accept it. He had what Okada, from meeting British officers in Burma, had come to know was a public school accent. British public schools, that is; Gardena High had never turned out an accent like Irvine’s. He had the assurance of someone who would never feel an outsider, anywhere at all.
‘I was in Tokyo before the war, as a junior naval attaché with the British embassy. We set up certain people as agents – we were working with our Secret Service, MI6. One of the agents was a man named Cairns. He was an authority on Oriental art, a professor at Tokyo University. He was very devoted to the Japanese in general, but not to their militarism, though he never said anything about that. He was highly regarded and he had access to a lot of top people. He was very valuable to us. He stayed on in Japan after war broke out in 1939 and even after Pearl Harbor – and the Japanese never suspected that he was an agent.’
Okada noticed that Irvine had not once used the word spy: the word was agent. Like most Americans of his time Okada knew little or nothing about spies and how they worked; he could remember seeing a couple of Alfred Hitchcock movies about British spies, but only one featuring an American. That had been Above Suspicion, which he had seen almost a year ago at the Language School: Joan Crawford had been an amateur, just as he would be if he agreed to go ahead with what was being suggested. He began to suspect that Irvine was the real professional in the room, at least in the field of espionage. He might be Royal Navy, but he was not just a sailor.
‘Professor Cairns was interned. Not sent to a prison camp, but to a resort village about forty miles south of Tokyo. Friendly aliens, if they had the right connections, were kept in several places like that. Aliens who did not want to be repatriated to their home countries or had no homelands to go to. Professor Cairns stayed on, ostensibly because he thought of Japan as his home – which he did. But he was also intent on continuing to work as an agent. He died in Nayora in May last year. Since then his wife has carried on in his place.’
‘How? I mean how does she get in touch with you?’
‘Cairns had a short-wave wireless somewhere in the village or nearby. Once a month, on a different day each month, his widow reports to a joint wireless station we run with the US Signal Corps in the Aleutians.’
‘Why can’t Mrs Cairns be Minato’s – what did you call it? Control?’
‘Yes, control. Two reasons. One, we’re not entirely sure of Mrs Cairns. I met her in Tokyo, but she had only just married Professor Cairns and, as far as we know, she didn’t know then that he was acting for us. Since his death she hasn’t fed us any false information – again as far as we know. We have to go on trust there. If she is on our side, then we can’t risk giving her away – I mean if Minato should doublecross us. You will, in effect, be the control for both of them.’
Okada gave his cough of laughter again. ‘The meat in the sandwich, you mean.’
‘Possibly,’ said Irvine. ‘I don’t think any of us are trying to fool you about your chances.’
Okada had felt out of his depth ever since he had entered the room; he had tried to float with the current, but now he was being swirled around. ‘You’re lengthening the odds too much, sir. You haven’t offered me one safe factor in this whole set-up.’
Embury took over again. ‘That’s true, corporal. Do you know of any safe factors in a war such as we’re fighting now?’
‘Yes, sir. Being posted to a base like this.’
‘That’s enough!’ Reilly couldn’t contain himself, rank or no rank.
Embury waved his pipe placatingly. ‘It’s okay, Roger. Corporal Okada is entitled to his opinion. I’m sure he feels the same way about the President being safe in the White House. The war is fought from many places.’
You son-of-a-bitch, thought Okada. He sat silent, putting on the mask he had inherited from his ancestors. At that moment, though he did not know it, he looked more Japanese than he ever had in his life before.
Okada sat staring at the one-way window in the wall. He was seated too low to be able to see into the next room. But Kenji Minato did not immediately interest him; the man next door was like himself, just a puppet in the game these men were playing. At last he said, ‘I’d like to think about it. But first, one question. How did you pick me out for this – mission?’
‘Your friend next door suggested you.’
So the course had been set and now he was on the last downward spiral of it; or at least of the first leg. He drifted through the cloud cover, which made him suddenly feel even more isolated; he was trapped in a nightmare. Panic grabbed at him, then let go; he dropped below the cloud into clear dark air. Japan rushed up at him out of the darkness; his stomach tightened and acid gushed up through his gullet and into his mouth. He caught a swift glimpse of pine trees that seemed to be jumping up at him like black sharks; the pale grey face of a precipice; and a snow-covered road that ran along the edge of the precipice. He jerked frantically on the cords of the parachute as he had been taught; but he was too inexperienced. It was luck, rather than skilful manoeuvring, that saved him. He sailed in above the cliff-face, hit a tree on the far side of the road, swung in hard against the tree-trunk and hung there twenty feet above the ground.
He was winded from hitting the tree and he felt sick from the acid in his mouth. But the overwhelming feeling was one of relief: he was alive. It was a good start: from now on he would have to learn to live by the hour.
He dropped the suitcase he carried, then awkwardly freed himself from the harness. He was wearing a flying-suit and flying-boots; he felt as cumbersome as a crippled bear. Somehow he got a foothold on the trunk of the tree and clambered up its branches to cut loose the tangled parachute. It took him another ten minutes to get the ’chute to the ground; it kept getting caught in the lower branches as he dropped it. At last he had it on the ground, folding it up so that it would serve as a sleeping-bag. Winter is no season for parachuting into enemy territory; but, he wryly told himself, war’s calendar never waits for corporals. If he survived the war he hoped he might get retrospective promotion and back pay.
He dug a