you’re in time to see your father.”
Kestrel saluted. “Thank you, Corporal. I hope so too.”
Inside the quonset hut, a large fan circulated hot air with enough force to slam shut the plywood
door behind Kestrel. A bareheaded private in a rumpled uniform glanced up from a newspaper.
He looked at the captain’s bars on Kestrel’s uniform, then at his face, then at his bars again. The
private half-rose, half-saluted and called over his shoulder.
“Lieutenant! Company!”
A crew-cut head appeared over a partition. The lieutenant was scowling. His expression changed
when he saw Kestrel standing at ease, his officer’s insignia shining in the dim light of the hut.
There was the sound of a chair scuffing across the floor and hurried footsteps.
The officer of the day was a young, very short first lieutenant whose uniform was correct in every
detail.
“Lieutenant Green, sir,” he said, stepping forward. “What can I do for you?”
Kestrel returned the salute and then shook hands, remembering to add enough pressure to
satisfy American standards of manhood. “I was hoping to catch a ride home on one of your
planes,” he said, handing over the forged papers.
Lieutenant Green scanned Kestrel’s orders, clicking his tongue sympathetically when he came to
the reasons for the compassionate leave.
“Captain, it’s never been my pleasure before to serve an Oriental member of my country’s
Army, but I can assure you it will be my pleasure now.” He moved to one side so that he could
see the Torch of Freedom shoulder patches on Kestrel’s uniform: “454th, isn’t it?” he asked.
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“Yes.”
“Then, sir, it is indeed a pleasure to serve you. Your unit is one of the most famous in the entire
Army, white or Oriental. Your men taught the world what courage is. You proved you weren’t
yellow.”
Kestrel was amused in spite of himself by the earnest young officer. “But we are, Lieutenant.”
The lieutenant’s eyes widened. “What do you – oh! Uh, that’s not what I meant at all, sir!”
“I know exactly what you meant, Lieutenant. All men are the same color in a foxhole.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“About that plane ride…?”
The lieutenant turned to the private. “Call the flight line. See if that C-47 has left yet. And move
it, Private!”
The private obeyed with a lack of enthusiasm that was just short of insolence. The lieutenant
appeared not to notice.
“Flight’s taxiing out now, sir,” drawled the private finally.
“Hold the plane!” snapped Lieutenant Green. “Tell them we have a top-priority officer – a
gallant member of our Nisei Battalion.”
The private and the first lieutenant exchanged a long look. Then, in a disgusted voice, the private
spoke into the phone. “Hold on, Sarge. We’ve got a Jap bumming a ride.”
Oakland
6 Hours 37 Minutes After Trinity
The morgue was like every other government building Finn had ever been in. Ugly.
Battleship-gray walls, dull linoleum floors, dirty ceilings hung with rows of cold lights, and air
that smelled used up. He hurried down a long stretch of corridor. The cold room at the end of
the hall was empty. A sign on the desk said, OUT TO LUNCH.
“Now what?” said Riley, looking with distaste at rank upon rank of drawers the size of shallow
coffins. “Just grab handles and start pulling out stiffs?”
Finn put the radiation counter on the desk and began fiddling with the adjustments. Like the .45
in the small of his back, the counter had become a part of him.
“Try the files,” said Finn. “Look under Ching Han Lo. That’s the name on the dead driver’s
license. The others are John Does and could be filed anywhere.”
Finn turned on the radiation counter. He moved the probe in long seeping lines, up one bank of
drawers and down another. He had covered one wall when Riley looked up.
“It’s not under Ching.”
Finn moved over to the long wall and continued his search pattern. Even with the counter on its
most sensitive setting, he could not be sure that the bodies would register. They might not have
absorbed enough radiation to be picked up through the steel drawers.
“Not under Han.”
Finn grunted and continued his search. As the number of drawers diminished, Finn began to
steel himself for an extended rummage through drawers full of death.
“Not under Lo.”
Riley slammed the file drawer in digust.
A sudden soft clicking came from the radiation counter. Then the clicks became harder, faster,
like a toy train careening around a track. Riley went over to Finn.
The probe moved over four drawers, hesitating at each one, then returning.
“Twenty-four through 27,” said Finn.
Riley reached for the handle of drawer 24. The drawer slid out with a squeal of steel discs on
steel tracks. The counter’s clicks ran together in a rush of sound. Finn took one look at the
corpse’s glazed, slanting eyes and shut the drawer. For Finn’s purposes, the driver was the least
interesting of the four bodies, victim rather than criminal.
“Was that the driver?” asked Riley.
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“Yeah. That was the easy one.”
Number 25 was a one-eyed Mexican. Finn swept the probe over his body. The counter clicks ran
together into an angry buzz.
“This one was lucky,” said Finn, looking at the corpse, then at the reading on the counter.
“Lucky?” said Riley tightly, trying not to see too much of what had once been a man’s left eye.
“Just how do you figure that?”
“Bullets are quick.” Finn squinted at the face. Something about the man was familiar. “Cover his
eye with the sheet.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“Not for you, Red. For me.”
Riley jerked up the sheet. Finn rearranged it until the right half of the head was revealed.
Without the gaping wound, the face looked normal except for the random smears of dried
blood.
“Know him?” said Riley, understanding finally why Finn had wanted the eye socket covered.
“Maybe. There are a lot like him along the border.”
Finn rolled shut the drawer and opened number 26. Beneath the sheet was a blunt-faced,
broad-shouldered man with powerful arms. His eyes and hair were not much darker than Finn’s,
and his hands made the radiation counter sing.
Finn pulled up the sheet, covering the bullet wounds on the torso and the vaguely surprised
expression on the face. “Adiós, Salvador,” he said.
“Salvador?”
“Salvador Leon – smuggler, bodyguard, murderer and all-around sweetheart. He works for a
Mexican crook called Refugio Reyes y Rincón.” The pattern was becoming more clear now. The
bodies were like tracks – physical facts devoid of emotion and politics and the exigence of war.
They were something he could depend on.
“What the hell are these Mexicans doing all the way up here?”
“The usual. Theft, murder, smuggling.”
“What about that other guy – Masarek – whose ID was in the sentry’s hand?”
“He hired Refugio, most likely.”
“But why? The job was in San Francisco, not Mexico.”
Finn looked at Riley’s pale, earnest face. “You’re from the Midwest, right?”
“Chicago.”
Finn nodded. “Ever been to the border?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s not some God-given black line stretching across the continent. Mexicans have been
ignoring that border for centuries, and up until a few years ago, so did we. Take Refugio. His
family has been working from San Francisco to Culiacán for at least a hundred years. I know,
because my father’s family has been chasing them for at least that long.”
Finn smiled. “They’ve caught a few, too. But the point is that Refugio, like most Mexicans, has
cousins and inlaws and uncles who are American citizens living everywhere from El Paso to San
Francisco. He even has some Chinese and Japanese thrown in along the line. He’s one of the few
Mexicans who can get in and out of Barrio Chino without an uproar.”
“Now,” continued Finn, “if you wanted to come into America without a passport, steal
something and then smuggle it back to Mexico, and from there across the Gulf to the Atlantic,
and from there to Russia – “
“I’d hire a man who knows his way around,” finished Riley.
“Refugio, or someone like him,” agreed Finn. “Nobody knows his way around like Refugio.”
“Is that how he ended up here?” said Riley, tapping drawer number 27.
“I’m not sure he did.”
The drawer came out smoothly. There was some radiation, but not nearly as much as Salvador
and the other man had shown.
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Finn shut off the counter, set it down and pulled aside the sheet. The corpse’s eyes and tongue
protruded grotesquely. The razor wire was still embedded in the purple flesh of the neck,
swinging with the forward motion of the drawer. Just below the right ear was an old scar left by
crude surgery to relieve mastoiditis.
Finn had seen all he needed. With a quick motion of his wrist, he covered the obscene remains of
the Russian spy.
Riley had his back turned and was breathing through clenched teeth. When he heard the drawer
close, he turned around again. His skin was very white, almost transparent, and covered with a
cold mist of sweat.
“Masarek,” said Finn, indicating the closed drawer.
“Christ,” said Riley between his teeth. “How could you tell?”
“Scar,” said Finn, pointing to his own neck. “He must have had a lot of earaches as a kid. Too
bad the doctor’s knife didn’t slip.”
Riley said nothing. He swallowed hard. Without a word, Finn grabbed Riley and hustled him
down the hall.
“Get it over with,” commanded Finn, kicking open the restroom door and shoving Riley
through.
Finn went back to the cold room, retrieved the radiation counter and walked down the hall
again. Riley came out of the restroom, wiping his face with a wet paper towel.
“Sorry.”
“You’ve still got your socks on,” said Finn. “That’s better than I did the first time around.”
Finn turned and began retracing his steps to the lobby. Riley followed him down the hall and up
a flight of stairs in companionable silence.
“What next?” said Riley, looking around the lobby.
“An APB on Refugio Reyes y Rincón.”
“What if he’s in Mexico?”
“I’d be damn grateful,” Finn said. “Mexicans aren’t as genteel about questioning people as we
are. Saves all kinds of time.”
“I’ll bet,” said Riley. “And after the APB?”
“I don’t know.”
Finn walked the rest of the hall in silence, arranging the few immutable facts he possessed in their
most likely configuration. Masarek, Refugio and his Mexican hirelings had penetrated Hunters
Point and stolen the two deadly chunks of metal. Then there had been a falling out. Masarek had
been killed, but not before he killed two of Refugio’s men. Someone had been waiting for the
truck on the waterfront – the blond woman, probably. Someone else had also been waiting,
another woman, the one who had helped Refugio escape: he would assume that it was Refugio
who was injured. As for the uranium… it was either in the second truck with Refugio or in the
car with the blond.
Finn ran through the facts again in his mind. The pattern fit, but he was not satisfied. Something
was missing from it. Refugio was a smuggler and a pimp, not a thief. The plan for the theft must
have been Russian, which meant that Refugio probably had little or no idea of what he was
stealing. Yet he had risked his life to steal the uranium from a man like Masarek. If the uranium
had been gold, it would make sense; Refugio knew the worth of gold to the last peso. Even if it
was assumed that Refugio knew what uranium was, what could he do with it once he had stolen
it from Masarek – sell it back to the U.S.? Possibly, but it was not quite Refugio’s style. His
political sympathies in the war lay with his pocket-book – and Takagura Omi. Japan, “Kestrel,”
Finn said aloud. “Kestrel.”
“What?” said Riley.
Finn did not hear. He was remembering the moment he had seen Kestrel in the Green Parrot.
Kestrel, alert and deadly, watching him across the body of a dead fighting cock. Kestrel’s eyes
had been as predatory as the hawk whose name he had taken.
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Yes. Kestrel.
Los Alamos
7 Hours 7 Minutes After Trinity
“Your call is on the line, General.”
Groves rubbed chocolate from his fingers with a handkerchief and took the phone. “How close
are you to a solution?”
“I don’t know.”
“Old Give-’Em-Hell-Harry was on the horn living up to his name. I don’t need to tell you what
he said.”
“Forty hours and fifty-one minutes,” Finn said succinctly.
“What?”
“The time left until 0530, July 18th, Mountain War Time, when either we give Truman the
uranium or he gives us an invasion.”
“Yes, that’s roughly what the President told me. Well?”
“All Hunters Point personnel vehicles are checked out and cleared. No radioactivity, except for
the storeroom where the canister was opened. After questioning the gate guards, I found out
that the vehicle the thieves used to enter and leave the Point was a truck from Ho’s Good Luck
Laundry.”
“ONI was quite impressed by your method of questioning the guards,” said Groves.
“It got answers.”
“I’m not criticizing, Captain. If I’d wanted a bridge party, I’d have sent the officers’ wives.”
“The Jaundry truck was found by the Oakland police. They waited an hour to call us.”
Groves heard the residual fury in Finn’s voice.
“When I finally got to the waterfront,” continued Finn, “the bodies were gone. The truck was
hot, and I don’t mean just stolen. The men who grabbed the isotope were either suicidal or
flunkies who didn’t know what they had. As far as I could tell, the uranium was still unshielded
when it was transferred to another truck.”
“And the men?”
“Dead. Two of them made the counter sing, but they didn’t die of radiation.”
“What next?” said the General bluntly.
“I have an APB out for the Mexican national whose men were in the morgue. The police and
hospitals are on the alert for unusual deaths or burn cases. The FBI is checking out every eyelash
and piece of lint from those bodies and the truck, and questioning everyone on the Oakland
waterfront….”
“Yes?” prompted General Groves.
“It’s something for them to do,” said Finn sardonically.
“You don’t think it will help?”
“If it can be done by the book, the FBI will do it. But the book was revised at dawn this
morning.”
There was a silence followed by a muttered oath. “Captain, I’ve shut down the ports and
borders. And I mean shut down. No ships leaving. No planes flying over. Nothing. You
couldn’t move a fart without my men smelling it. But that won’t do any good if the thieves just
