Vette Head's Not Dead

CHAPTER 1

Zama City, Honshu, Japan

1916, 5 October 1985

Captain Jim Stillwater grabbed the steering wheel of the parked car as if he was setting up for a turn at Sebring racetrack. Calm down, Lieutenant Joyner. Turn on some music or something. You’re driving me nuts playing with the door lock button.

After spending most of the day in the car with nothing to do but wait, Rick fidgeted some more and adjusted the cramped seat, attempting to make space between his knees and the sharp underside of the dashboard. He finally reached for the car radio and tuned up and down the radio dial several times, searching for something interesting. Not having any luck, he picked up one of Jim’s cassette tapes off the console and popped it into the tape deck. As Pink Floyd’s tremor grew, Rick sighed and clicked his tongue.

I know surveillance is usually boring, Jim said, but you’re in Japan, so enjoy the sights and sounds. You could be in a lot worse places. I hate being stuck inside a car for hours on end too, but we’re dry, we have good tunes, and no one’s shooting at us.

That’s why it’s boring, Sir. If we’re lucky, this could get hairy—if the Colonel is right.

This is just another routine gig, Rick. The guys we’re trying to find aren’t much of a threat. And besides, after a while you’ll start appreciating these routine trips a little more.

Sir, Colonel Fistney seems to be convinced something big is gonna go down. He didn’t send us all the way to Japan just for sightseeing.

Jim sighed. First of all, area familiarization may seem like sightseeing to you now, but if you ever need to operate here some day it’s gonna give you a real leg up. With due respect for Fistney, I don’t buy his theory about a big event. It just isn’t their style. Chukaka-Ha has never even tried to pull off anything big. This surveillance is basically a training exercise, Rick.

Check, Sir, but we do training exercises all the time and we still get graded on ’em. We haven’t even talked to our contact yet.

You let me worry about the grades, Jim told him. For now, keep your eyes open, especially for motorcycles. The guy we’re looking for comes by this station several times a week on a yellow crotch rocket.

Rick creased his brow and turned to look out the window of the Honda, watching the motorcycle parking area near the train station. He felt for his pistol and let his thumb move the safety off and on a few times, not aware of the click as he concentrated on the scene outside the car.

Jim noticed the off-on-off-on click of the pistol’s safety. It reminded him of the Colonel’s nervous habit of clicking his ballpoint pen during staff meetings. If I hear you click that safety again, I’m gonna take your weapon.

Rick quickly pulled his hand away from the pistol. Check, Sir.

And by the way, remember to call me Jim while we’re in the field. Jim regretted his harsh tone as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He knew Rick was still a novice and realized that he was coming down a little bit hard on him. After a brief pause, he added, I think we’ve both been in this car too long. If this guy doesn’t show soon, let’s get some food.

Jim looked at the sushi bar in the rear view mirror. The place seemed busy, which he thought was always a good sign. He considered his partner. Third time in Japan, and this time I have to drag along a first lieutenant that won’t even try to eat sushi. But I guess if he wants to spend all of his per-diem on Budweiser and bad Japanese attempts at American food, then that’s his problem.

Jim was hungry, and he was getting bored, too. His thoughts drifted from daydreams about being home on the North Shore with his wife Gwen, to more serious thoughts and worries about whether or not she could find all of the bills on his messy desk—bills that needed to be paid.

But thoughts about the mission also kept surfacing. They were in Japan to detect and deter a possible Chukaka-Ha terrorist operation targeting DOD assets in Japan. And even though Chukaka-Ha (CH in the counterterrorism world) was considered to be a terrorist organization, most of the time they behaved more like Japan’s very own version of Greenpeace. Every once in a while they fired off a homemade rocket that never seemed to hit anything important, either due to ineptitude or because they only wanted to send a message. No one was really sure.

At the height of the Cold War, this business was often about answering false alarms. Captain Jim Stillwater and First Lieutenant Rick Joyner were part of Uncle Ronnie’s Army, a name based on President Ronald Reagan’s frequent use of the military and its unprecedented budget. And it was another name for what insiders called the Army within the Army—the guys that were fighting the Cold War. The rest of the Army called them the Dark Side. Journalists called them black ops units and considered them to be synonymous with the CIA. The guys in these small, specialized units loved the fact that The Agency got the blame if something they did leaked out. Most of what they did in the shadows was routine. And sometimes it was just plain boring.

CHAPTER 2

Narita Airport, Near Tokyo, Japan

0514, 7 October 1985

On their first day in Japan, Stillwater and Joyner had a chance to see Chukaka-Ha and other assorted Japanese radicals in action, firsthand.

They had arrived at Narita Airport two days earlier. More than forty miles outside Tokyo, Narita was the focus of anti-foreigner, anti-American, and anti-everything-else activity. Built to replace the old Tokyo airport, Narita was built on land that had been rice paddies for centuries before being drained and filled for the airport construction. The Japanese government had exercised eminent domain and evicted the local farmers to enable the construction.

Since rice was almost sacred in Japan, the idea of filling in rice paddies upset a lot of the local populace. Protests began the day the construction was announced. Groups like Chukaka-Ha were quick to exploit the situation, and no doubt recruited many new followers in the surrounding neighborhoods. In 1984, just days before the airport was to open, a group of terrorists forced their way into the control tower and destroyed all of the electronics equipment with axes.

Narita opened again several months later, but the security surrounding the airport made the place look like a war zone. Protesters at the police lines occasionally added to the realism of the macabre atmosphere. Japanese police in riot gear looked like a cross between fifteenth-century Samurai and Darth Vader. Dressed in black, with padded flaps attached to their German-style helmets and solid plastic cuirass-like chest pieces, they paraded around the airport with oversized riot batons.

To Stillwater, passage in and out of Narita was like going through an airlock. Every vehicle leaving or entering the airport was stopped, and passengers waited while a black armored bus was pulled back from the roadway. After being ushered into the security area, Stillwater and Joyner’s taxi was motioned to a halt by the plastic armor-clad police. The armored bus was then pushed back onto the roadway, blocking any retreat and trapping the vehicle between it and an identical bus blocking the exit ahead. After the police glanced at their tourist passports, the bus in front was pulled aside and their taxi was motioned forward.

The surrounding countryside was a stark contrast to Stalag Narita. Carefully manicured farms and terraced rice paddies formed a beautiful panorama. On the day Stillwater and Joyner arrived, the bus being rolled aside was like the opening of a stage curtain in an absurd play. This opening revealed a scene that reminded Stillwater of a scene out of an old movie—maybe Ivanhoe. They were now in the middle of a set depicting a middle ages castle under siege.

A phalanx of armored police with riot shields was maintaining a line along the exit road from the airport. The road into the airport was also well defended in preparation for an assault by a well-organized group numbering more than five hundred women and men, both young and old.

Smaller subgroups were differentiated only by different-colored armbands, which corresponded to the rioters’ tasks. Green armbands identified the ones with gloves and masks who were collecting the tear gas grenades and throwing them back across police lines. Yellow armbands identified the rock and Molotov cocktail throwers. Battering ram crews with red armbands charged the lines of shield-bearing police with telephone poles, opening holes in the line that the non-arm banded masses could surge through. The baton-wielding police quickly regained ground, and the police line continued to ebb and flow like waves lapping a beach.

Stillwater shot two rolls of film to chronicle the spectacle before the taxi driver threatened to take them back to the police. The gray haired and bespectacled driver was visibly embarrassed by the greeting some of his countrymen had prepared for the two apparent businessmen from the United States.

CHAPTER 3

Schofield Barracks, Hawaii

0600, 4 October 1985

Colonel Fistney, Stillwater’s unit commander, seemed convinced that the CH were really going to do something spectacular this time. A walk-in informant had warned that Chukaka-Ha was going to hijack a bus full of American military dependants on their way to school in the greater Tokyo area. Another report stated that the group planned to blow up a bus. A recent investigative report by the Los Angeles Daily News quoted a senior Department of Defense intelligence source as saying that Chukaka-Ha’s influence was waning, and that a spectacular act would be needed to boost recruitment.

So that’s where Fistney picked up the word spectacular, Jim thought. It also crossed his mind that Fistney himself might have been the source quoted in the article.

Stillwater carefully read everything that Fistney had gathered together for the mission package, and then he did some checking through the grapevine. Sending out a team based almost solely on walk-in information just didn’t make sense. He also considered the fact that Fistney had recently attended a friend’s funeral in Honolulu. Fistney was still on edge after the death of his friend, so Jim decided not to push the issue with his boss.

The old boy network didn’t think very much of Fistney in general or his opinion of this threat in particular. Fistney hadn’t left U.S. soil since he came back from Vietnam twelve years ago. He seemed to really enjoy sending his boys out on wild goose chases that always appeared to have the potential of saving the Western World. He was a skilled leader in some respects, always getting the troops pumped up before sending them on their way. Fistney took this stuff very seriously.

Whether it was his strict Mormon upbringing or the result of a traumatic event in his Phoenix Program days in Vietnam, Fistney was a hard guy to work for. Almost all of the new guys were just a little bit afraid of him, and the old hands respected him because he really had been a hero—once upon a time. On the plus side, his pompous attitude actually lightened up the atmosphere back in garrison. But then again, it would have been pretty hard to hurt the morale of the kind of hard chargers that made up the detachment its members called the Det, never saying its true name.

In the Det a character like Fistney became a source of entertainment. One infamous example of Fistney the Pompous occurred early one morning as the troops were showing up at the headquarters compound after a long, early-morning physical training session. Stillwater and the executive officer, Major Night, were chomping on stogies on the second floor lanai at the front of the building. They noticed Fistney chewing out a young enlisted guy in the parking lot. The young soldier stood stiffly at attention as Fistney’s head bobbed up and down and his hand waved frantically.

After exchanging salutes with the soldier and sending him on his way, Fistney sauntered barely another fifteen meters before another young trooper doubled over with laughter in front of him. It was just getting light enough for the XO and Stillwater to notice that the soldier was pointing at what appeared to be lime-green fuzzy slippers on Fistney’s feet.

Fistney quickly returned a salute rendered by the young soldier and looked in every direction to see who else might have seen his predicament. Fistney even looked up at the balcony at about the same moment the two officers had grabbed the railing to prevent falling to the ground in laughter. Catching the gaze of Stillwater and the XO, Fistney froze in his tracks and stared up at them for a moment. He then quickly turned and ran back to his car. Stillwater and the XO hurried to their desks, knowing that Fistney would be embarrassed and might assign them some idiotic task to complete in order to reassert his authority.

A little more than half an hour later, Fistney sent his dutiful civilian secretary Faye to summon the two officers to his office. While they stood at parade rest in front of Fistney’s desk, he explained that he wore slippers over his boots when he was in the car to protect the spit shine. The two were quickly dismissed when it became clear that Stillwater and the XO were unable to wipe the grins off their faces.

CHAPTER 4

Zama City, Japan

1705, 7 October 1985

A fine mist was in the air and the temperature was starting to drop into the 40s. Jim saw the bustling train station up ahead and knew it was time to start out on foot. The crowd would block their line of sight from the car and slow any pursuit. Besides, the counterintelligence puke that was following him and the lieutenant was starting to annoy him. Usually just called CI, the common joke was that these guys were true to their name: opposed to intelligent thought.

It was common in an overseas setting to be watched occasionally by your own side, and Jim recognized the need for the practice. But when the surveillance was this obvious, it might be just as obvious to the bad guys. The practice was a little bit insulting too, since most of the CI guys were mid-grade enlisted or junior officers. The operators and collectors that CI was attempting to keep tabs on tended to be more senior and more experienced, and this often led to a bit of toying with the CI guys.

Amazingly, there was a parking spot in front of the local Pachinko parlor, but Rick wasn’t sure about it. Sir, we can’t take that spot; there’s a guy standing there holding it.

Well, give the guy a hundred yen, tell him to haul ass, and write it off as a parking expense, Jim replied. He knew it would work, since most Japanese were a little bit intimidated by Gaijin in their country.

Check, Sir. What about all of the surveillance gear in the trunk?

Don’t sweat it, LT. This is Japan. You could leave your wallet on the street, come back tomorrow, and it would still be there, except they would have picked it up once when they swept. Jim shook his head in disbelief. It amazes me that you can be a level three Japanese linguist and know so little about Japanese culture.

Rick had a comeback for that one. That’s OK, Sir. It amazes me that you can get around so easily when you can barely speak the language.

Stillwater and Joyner got out of the four-door Honda. Jim slammed the door in disgust and dodged a couple of school kids on bikes as he stepped onto the curb. He had been into hot rods since he was a kid growing up in Miami. While many of his friends spent their part time job money on partying, Jim had poured almost every penny he earned mopping floors and mowing lawns into his souped-up Boss Mustang. He’d spent many long nights in his parent’s garage, tweaking the ‘stang just so he could beat the behinds off those Trans Ams and GTOs. He raced his car mostly for bragging rights on the deserted, drag strip-straight roads behind the Doral Country Club, every Friday and Saturday night.

It really irked Jim that he had to drive a rice burner on this assignment instead of the souped-up Mustang GT waiting back in Hawaii. He knew it would stand out in Japan, but the brute force of the ‘stang had saved his butt more than once.

Just last month in Honolulu, a drunk and pistol-wielding Samoan had chased Jim until he finally drove the wrong way down a section of Ala Moana Boulevard. Without a scratch on the car and himself no worse for wear, he thought the whole event was a blast. The problem was that his passengers—his wife Gwen and another captain from the real Army—were less than psyched by the experience.

Stillwater went to the cops and reported the incident to cover his ass. The only thing that upset his evening was when the cop at the desk said he was surprised this was the first time a Sumo wrestler-sized Samoan had messed with him, since he had been on the island for almost three years.

Gwen and Gregg, the captain, were shaken up by the experience, so that was it for that night. It was takeout Chinese instead of Friday’s Restaurant for dinner. You never knew what was going to happen when you went out to dinner with Jim.

Stillwater looked into the window of the Pachinko parlor. Armies of Japanese businessmen in blue sport coats and loosened ties sat in front of the Pachinko machines, watching the silver balls trickle downward inside their glass mazes. He changed his focus to the windowpane and saw the reflection of the CI guy across the street. Maybe he wasn’t so stupid after all. He did find a parking spot fast—or maybe he was just lucky.

It bothered Stillwater that the guy was so persistent. He looked a little too old for the typical Army CI guy working the street, but he was definitely an American, and his tradecraft was right out of the book. Stillwater’s instincts told him something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it could be.

The counterintelligence guys were famous for their inept surveillance of servicemen and for their even sadder attempts at entrapping them into revealing classified information