While Tazuko Komura was packing some food and juice in her kitchen, she thought about a man in the phone booth she’d seen the night before below for what seemed an unusually long time. Through the small telescope in her tiny, three-room apartment she’d been able to see that the man wasn’t using the phone, but was dusting it with a small brush. It both frightened and reassured her — frightened her, because it meant police or JDF agents were closing in, altogether too close, but reassured her because they were dusting for prints. Obviously they didn’t know who had used the public phone. And what would they have heard when they tapped it? A man’s voice asking for a Mrs. Yoshio, and a woman’s voice, hers, answering that there was no Yoshio “living here.” And anyway, the police who were following up the call couldn’t possibly know it was the signal for her to act, to do what her cell of three had spent months planning.
Even so, Tazuko knew she would be in grave danger the moment she stepped out on the street. If anyone searched her shopping bag, they might find the explosive. Or would the way she had camouflaged it fool them? As she finished her coffee she noticed her right hand was trembling, half from fear, half in excitement. She knew she must control it, and in order to do that she first had to lose control. She was wound up tighter than a spring.
Tazuko lay down on the carpeted floor, placed a pillow beneath her head with her left hand and slid her right hand under her skirt and taut, white nylon panties. Very soon she was moaning softly, moving ever so slowly at first but then increasing the pressure until she was rolling back and forth in her mounting ecstasy. Suddenly her back arched, and it was as if she was suspended in time, her free hand clutching the air.
When she woke fifteen minutes later, she felt drained of all tension, her nerves calmed for the task ahead.
In the South China Sea, approximately halfway between the Spratly and Paracel island groups, the helo from the now sunken Chinese frigate ran out of gas and dropped like a stone into the sea.
Naked in his recliner, belching after draining another scotch on the rocks, Breem farted, told Mi Yin to “get the fuck outta the way” of the TV, and switched from the local Hong Kong station to CNN, where they were showing more shots of the PLA herding prisoners they’d taken from various “liberated” oil and gas rigs into a makeshift POW camp “somewhere” in China.
“More fucking losers,” Breem proclaimed, taking a handful of beer nuts, trying to pop them in his mouth one at a time and missing now and then, some of them rolling down into his crotch. “Fetch them, baby. Go on, fetch!” This was followed by laughter that rippled through his belly. “Hey hey hey!” he said, abruptly sitting up. An ABC “scoop” window was superimposed on the lower right corner of CNN pictures of the Chinese destroyer picking up “victims” of a “warmongering attack” in the South China Sea by what was believed to be an American submarine. Breem zoomed in on the superimposed ABC window, the New York anchor reporting that a “Sea Wolf SSN/SBN had been sunk off the Hawaiian island of Oahu by what naval sources were “unofficially” describing as an American-made Captor 60 mine or mines. It was suspected that the mine or mines that had gutted the U.S. sub had apparently been laid by a Chinese merchantman, the Wang Chow, en route to the U.S. West Coast when hostilities broke out between China and the United States. Now ABC’s “Nightline” was reporting over forty crew aboard the 132-man submarine had been killed, due largely to a subsequent fire-created explosion in the forward torpedo room.
“More fucking losers!” Breem proclaimed, his mouth half full of beer nuts. “Oh well, more yuan for B.I.” He was talking about Breem Industrials, listed on the Hong Kong exchange as one of the South Asia Industries group.
“How come?” Mi Yin asked.
“Come any way you like.” Breem thought this bon mot hilarious and laughed so hard, scotch and beer nuts sprayed the carpet. He tossed Mi Yin the empty glass. “Ice, my little juicy fruit. More yuan for me, my lovely, because who is the biggest seller of marine munitions — among other things — in the Near East?”
“You are,” Mi Yin said, handing him a glass of crushed ice turned golden with Johnnie Walker.
“ ‘Course,” he added, “manufacturers of Captors, et cetera, don’t know I’ve cornered the market. They only sell through ‘legitimate’ firms. Saps!” Breem knew he was drunk and that he was talking too much. “But hey, Juicy Fruit. What fuckin’ good is success if you can’t share it, right?” He meant “flaunt” it.
“Yes.”
“Right!” he bellowed.
“Right.”