It was the way his father and mother and brother and sister must have
come, and he imagined he could see his father, hobbling on his crippled leg,
struggling for the dignity that his childhood disease had always denied him.
Had he served the soldiers in those last days, bringing them what useful
things he had? Had the soldiers in those last days set aside their crude insults
at his physical condition and thanked him with the sincerity of men for
whom death was now something seen and felt in its approach? Yamata
chose to believe both. And they would have come down this draw, their re-
treat toward death protected by the last rear-guard action of soldiers in their
last moment of perfection.
It was called Banzai Cliff by the locals, Suicide Cliff by the less racist.
Yamata would have to have his public-relations people work on changing
the name to something more respectful. July 9, 1944, the day organized re-
sistance ended. The day the Americans had declared the island of Saipan
“secure.”
There were actually two cliffs, curved and facing inward as though a thea-
ter; the taller of them was two hundred forty meters above the surface of the
beckoning sea. There were marble columns to mark the spot, built years ear-
lier by Japanese students, shaped to represent children kneeling in prayer. It
would have been here that they’d approached the edge, holding hands. He
could remember his father’s strong hands. Would his brother and sister have
been afraid? Probably more disoriented than fearful, he thought, after
twenty-one days of noise and horror and incomprehension. Mother would
have looked at father. A warm, short, round woman whose jolly musical
laugh rang again in her son’s ears. The soldiers had occasionally been gruff
with his father, but never with her. And never with the children. And the last
service the soldiers had rendered had been to keep the Americans away from
them at that final moment, when they’d stepped off the cliff. Holding hands,
Yamata chose to believe, each holding a child in a final loving embrace,
proudly refusing to accept captivity at the hands of barbarians, and orphan-
ing their other son. Yamata could close his eyes and see it all, and for the
first time the memory and the imagined sight made his body shudder with
emotion. He’d never allowed himself anything more than rage before, all the
times he’d come here over the years, but now he could truly let the emotions
out and weep with pride, for he had repaid his debt of honor to those who had
given him birth, and his debt of honor to those who had done them to death.
In full.
The driver watched, not knowing but understanding, for he knew the his-
tory of this place, and he too was moved to tears as a shaking man of sixty-
odd years clapped his hands to call the attention of sleeping relatives. From a
hundred meters away, he saw the man’s shoulders rack with sobs, and after a
time, Yamata lay down on his side, in his business suit, and went to sleep.
Perhaps he would dream of them. Perhaps the spirits ol wlim-vct H was, llio
driver thought, would visit him in his sleep and say what things lu- needed to
hour. But the real surprise, the driver thought, was that the1 old hastanl had a
ftoul at all. Perhaps he’d misjudged his boss.
“Damn if they ain’t organized,” Oreza said to himself, looking through hi.s
binoculars, the cheap ones he kept in the house.
The living-room window afforded a view of the airports, and the kitchen
gave one of the harbor. Orchid Ace was long gone, and another car ferry had
taken her berth, Century Highway No. 5, her name was, and this one was
unloading jeep-type vehicles and trucks. Portagee was fairly strung-out,
having forced himself to stay up all night. He’d now done twenty-seven
hours without sleep, some of them spent working hard on the ocean west of
the island. He was too old for that sort of thing, the master chief knew. Bur-
roughs, younger and smarter, had curled up on the living-room rug and was
•noring away.
Oreza wished for a cigarette for the first time in years. They were good for
•laying alert. You just needed them at a time like this. They were what a
warrior used-at least that’s what the World War II movies proclaimed. But
this wasn’t World War II, and he wasn’t a warrior. For all he’d done in his
over thirty years in the United States Coast Guard, he’d never fired a shot in
•nger, even on his one Vietnam tour. Someone else had always been on the
gun. He didn’t know how to fight.
“Up all night?” Isabel asked, dressed for her job. It was Monday on this
tide of the International Dateline, and a workday. She looked down and saw
that the pad of note paper usually kept next to the phone was covered with
•cribbles and numbers. ‘ ‘Does it matter?”
“I don’t know, Izz.”
“Want some breakfast?”
“It can’t hurt,” Pete Burroughs said, stretching as he came into the
kitchen. “I think I conked out around three.” A moment’s consideration. “I
feel like . . . hell,” he said, in deference to the lady in the room.
“Well, I have to be at my desk in an hour or so,” Mrs. Oreza observed,
pulling open the refrigerator. Breakfast in this house consisted of a selection
of cold cereals and skim milk, Burroughs saw, along with toast made of the
bread baked from straw. Toss in a little fruit, he thought, and he could have
been back in San Jose. The coffee he could already smell. He found a cup
•nd poured some.
“Somebody really knows how to do this right.”
“It’s Manni,” Isabel said.
Oreza smiled for the first time in hours. “I learned it from my first chief,
The right blend, the right proportions, and a pinch of salt.”
Probably in the dark of the moon and after sacrificing a goat, Burroughs
thought. If so, however, the goat had died for a noble cause. He took a long
sip and came over to check Oreza’s tally sheet.
“That many?”
“Could be conservative. It’s two flying hours from here to Japan. That’s
four on the round-trip. Let’s be generous and say ninety minutes on the
ground at each end. Seven-hour cycle. Three and a half trips per airplane per
day. Each flight about three hundred, maybe three-fifty soldiers per hop.
That means every plane brings in a thousand men. Fifteen airplanes operat-
ing over one day, that means a whole division of troops. You suppose the
Japs have more than fifteen 7475?” Portagee asked. “Like I said, conserva-
tive. Now it’s just a matter of bringing their mobile equipment in.”
“How many ships for that?”
Another frown. “Not sure. During the Persian Gulf War-I was over
there then doing port-security work . . . damn. Depends on what ships you
use and how you pack them. I’ll be conservative again. Twenty large mer-
chant hulls just to ferry in the gear. Trucks, jeeps, all kinds of stuff you’d
never think of. It’s like moving a cityful of people. They need to resupply
fuel. This rock doesn’t grow enough food; that has to come in by ship, too,
and the population of this place just doubled. The water supply might be
stretched.” Oreza looked down and made a notation on that. “Anyway, they
came to stay. That’s for damned sure,” he said, heading for the table and his
Special K, wishing for three eggs up, bacon, white-bread toast with butter,
hash-browns, and all the cholesterol that went with it. Damn turning fifty!
‘ ‘What about me?” the engineer asked.’ ‘I seen you pass for a local. I sure
as hell can’t.”
“Pete, you’re my charter, and I’m the captain, okay? I am responsible for
your safety. That’s the law of the sea, sir.”
“We’re not at sea anymore,” Burroughs pointed out.
Oreza was annoyed by the truth of the observation. “My daughter’s the
lawyer. I try to keep things simple. Eat your breakfast. I need some sleep,
and you have to take over the forenoon watch.”
“What about me?” Mrs. Oreza asked.
‘ ‘If you don’t show up for work-”
“-somebody will wonder why.”
“It’ll be nice to know if they told the truth about the cops who got shot,”
her husband went on. “I’ve been up all night, Izz. I haven’t heard a single
shot. Every crossroads seems to be manned, but they’re not doing anything
to anybody.” He paused. “I don’t like it either, honey. One way or another
we have to deal with it.”
“Did you do it, Ed?” Durling asked bluntly, his eyes boring in on his Vice
President. He cursed the man for forcing him to deal with one more problem
mnonj: (he multiple crises hanging over his presidency now. lint (In- I’aM