its immigrants unless they adopted a fully Japanese identity, a fact made all
the more odd in that the Japanese people were themselves a mere offshoot of
the Korean, a fact proven by DNA research but which was conveniently and
somewhat indignantly denied by the better sections of Japanese society. All
foreigners were gaijin, a word which like most words in the local language
had many flavors. Usually translated benignly as meaning just “foreign-
ers,” the word had other connotations-like “barbarian,” Chet Nomuri
thought, with all of the implicit invective that the word had carried when
first coined by the Greeks. The irony was that as an American citizen he was
gaijin himself, despite 100 percent Japanese ethnicity, and while he had
grown up quietly resenting the racist policies of the U.S. government that
had once caused genuine harm to his family, it had required only a week in
the land of his ancestors for him to yearn for a return to Southern California,
where the living was smooth and easy.
It was for Chester Nomuri a strange experience, living and “working”
here. He’d been carefully screened and interviewed before being assigned to
Operation SANOALWOOD. Having joined the Agency soon after graduating
UCLA, not quite remembering why he’d done so except for a vague desire
for adventure mixed with a family tradition of government service, he’d
found somewhat to his surprise that he enjoyed the life. It was remarkably
like police work, and Nomuri was a fan of police TV and novels. More than
that, it was so damned interesting. He learned new things every day. It was
like being in a living history classroom. Perhaps the most important lesson
he’d learned, however, was that his great-grandfather had been a wise and
insightful man. Nomuri wasn’t blind to America’s faults, but he preferred
life there to life in any of the countries he’d visited, and with that knowledge
had come pride in what he was doing, even though he still wasn’t quite sure
what the hell he was really up to. Of course, neither did his Agency, but
Nomuri had never quite understood that, even when they’d told him so at the
Farm. How could it be possible, after all? It must have been an inside-the-
institution joke.
At the same time, in a dualism he was too young and inexperienced to
appreciate fully, Japan could be an easy place in which to operate. That was
especially true on the commuter train.
The degree of crowding here was enough to make his skin crawl. He had
not been prepared for a country in which population density compelled close
contact with all manner of strangers, and, indeed, he’d soon realized that the
cultural mania with fastidious personal hygiene and mannerly behavior was
simply a by-product of it. People so often rubbed, bumped, or otherwise
crushed into contact with others that the absence of politeness would have
resulted in street killings to shame the most violent neighborhood in Amer-
ica. A combination of smiling embarrassment at the touches and icy personal
isolation made it tolerable to the local citizens, though it was something that
still gave Nomuri trouble. “Give the guy some space” had been a catch-
phrase at UCLA. Clearly it wasn’t here, because there simply wasn’t the
space to give.
Then there was the way they treated women. Here, on the crowded trains,
the standing and sitting salarymen read comic books, called manga, the local
versions of novels, which were genuinely disturbing. Recently, a favorite of
the eighties had been revived, called Rin-Tin-Tin. Not the friendly dog from
19505 American television, but a dog with a female mistress, to whom he
talked, and with whom he had . . . sexual relations. It was not an idea that
appealed to him, but there, sitting on his bench seat, was a middle-aged ex-
ecutive, eyes locked on the pages with rapt attention, while a Japanese
woman stood right next to him and stared out the train’s windows, maybe
noticing, maybe not. The war between the sexes in this country certainly had
rules different from the ones with which he’d been raised, Nomuri thought.
He set it aside. It was not part of his mission, after all-an idea he would
soon find to be wrong.
He never saw the cutout. As he stood there in the third car of the train,
close to the rear door, hanging on to an overhead bar and reading a paper, he
didn’t even notice the insertion of the envelope into the pocket of his over-
coat. It was always that way-at the usual place the coat got just a touch
heavier. He’d turned once to look and seen nothing. Damn, he’d joined the
right outfit.
Eighteen minutes later the train entered the terminal, and the people
emerged from it like a horizontal avalanche, exploding outward into the ca-
pacious station. The salaryman ten feet away tucked his “illustrated novel”
into his briefcase and walked off to his job, wearing his customarily impas-
sive mien, doubtless concealing thoughts of his own. Nomuri headed his
own way, buttoning his coat and wondering what his new instructions were.
“Does the President know?”
Ryan shook his head. “Not yet.”
‘ ‘You think maybe he ought to?” Mary Pat Foley asked.
‘ ‘At the proper time.”
“I don’t like putting officers at risk for-”
‘ ‘At risk?” Jack asked.’ ‘I want him to develop information, not to make a
contact, and not to expose himself. I gather from the case notes I’ve seen so
far that all he has to do is make a follow-up question, and unless their locker
rooms are different from ours, it shouldn’t expose him at all.”
“You know what I mean,” the Deputy Director (Operations) observed,
rubbing her eyes. It had been a long day, and she worried about her field
officers. Every good DDO did, and she was a mother who’d once been
picked up by the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate herself.
Operation SANDALWOOD had started innocently enough, if an intelligence
operation on foreign soil could ever be called innocent. The preceding oper-
ation had been a joint FBI/CIA show, and had gone very badly indeed: an
American citizen had been apprehended by the Japanese police with burglar
tools in his possession-along with a diplomatic passport, which in this par-
ticular case had been more of a hindrance than a help. It had made the papers
in a small way. Fortunately the media hadn’t quite grasped what the story
was all about. People were buying information. People were selling informa-
tion. It was often information with “secret” or higher classifications
scrawled across the folders, and the net effect was to hurt American inter-
ests, such as they were.
“How good is he?” Jack asked.
Mary Pat’s face relaxed at little. “Very. The kid’s a natural. He’s learning
to fit in, developing a base of people he can hit for background information.
We’ve set him up with his own office. He’s even turning us a nice profit. His
orders are to be very careful,” Mrs. Foley pointed out yet again.
“I hear you, MP,” Ryan said tiredly. “But if this is for-real-”
“I know, Jack. I didn’t like what Murray sent over either.”
“You believe it?” Ryan asked, wondering about the reaction he’d get.
“Yes, I do, and so does Murray.” She paused. “If we develop informa-
tion on this, then what?”
‘ ‘Then I go to the President, and probably we extract anyone who wants to
be extracted.”
“I will not risk Nomuri that way!” the DDO insisted, a little too loudly.
“Jesus, Mary Pat, I never expected that you would. Hey, I’m tired, too,
okay?”
“So you want me to send in another team, let him just bird-dog it for
them?” she asked.
“It’s your operation to run, okay? I’ll tell you what to do, but not how.
Lighten up, MP.” That statement earned the National Security Advisor a
crooked smile and a semiapology.
“Sorry, Jack. I keep forgetting you’re the new guy on this block.”
“The chemicals have various industrial uses,” the Russian colonel ex-
plained to the American colonel.
“Good for you. All we can do is burn ours, and the smoke’ll kill you.”
The rocket exhaust from the liquid propellants wasn’t exactly the Breath of
Spring either, of course, but when you got down to it, they were industrial
chemicals with a variety of other uses.
As they watched, technicians snaked a hose from the standpipe next to the
missile puskatel, the Russian word for “silo,” to a truck that would trans-
port the last of the nitrogen tetroxide to a chemical plant. Below, another
fitting on the missile body took another hose that pumped pressurized gas
into the top of the oxidizer tank, the better to drive the corrosive chemical
out. The top of the missile was blunt. The Americans could see where the
warhead ‘ ‘bus” had been attached, but it had already been removed, and was
now on another truck, preceded by a pair of BTR-yo infantry fighting vehi-