Black wind

more fortunate than we know that all but one of the canisters were demolished on the I-403,” Gunn remarked.
    “That still leaves one canister unaccounted for,” Dirk replied.
    “Yes, as well as the other mission ordnance,” Yaeger added.
    Dirk and Gunn looked at each other. “What other mission?” Gunn asked incredulously.
    “The I-411.”
    Yaeger felt their eyes boring right through him.
    “Didn’t you know?” he asked. “There was a second submarine, the I-411. It, too, was armed with the Maka^e ordnance and was sent to attack the eastern seaboard of the United States,” Yaeger said quietly, realizing he had just dropped a bomb of his own.
    It had been a long day for Takeo Yoshida. A crane operator for the Yokohama Port Development Corporation, Yoshida had toiled since six in the morning loading an aged Iberian freighter with container after container of Japanese consumer electronics bound for export. He had just secured the last of the metal containers onto the ship’s deck when a radio crackled in the crane’s control cabin.
    “Yoshida, this is Takagi,” the deep voice of his foreman grumbled. “Report to Dock D-5 upon completion with San Sebastian. A single loading for the vessel Baekje. Takagi, out.”
    “Affirmed, Takagi-san,” Yoshida answered, holding his disdain under his breath. Just twenty minutes to go on his shift and Takagi gives him a last-minute assignment across the shipyard. Securing the crane, Yoshida walked eight hundred yards across the Honmoku Port Terminal toward Dock D-5, cursing Takagi’s name with each step he took. As he approached the end of the pier, he glanced beyond at the waters of the bustling port of Yokohama, where a constant stream of commercial ships jockeyed into position for loading and unloading.
    With three hundred meters of waterfront, container terminal D-5 was big enough to handle the largest cargo ships afloat. Yoshida was surprised to find the vessel tied to the dock was not the typical jumbo containership awaiting a load of industrial cargo but a special-purpose cable ship. Yoshida even recognized the Baekje as having been built in the nearby Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard. At 436 feet long and with a beam of 133 feet, the stout vessel was designed to lay fiber-optic cable on the seafloor while withstanding the turbulent seas of the North Pacific. With a modern-appearing superstructure and white paint that still glistened, Yoshida could tell that it had not been many years since the high-tech ship slid into Yokohama Bay for the first time. She sported a Korean flag above the bridge mast and a blue lightning bolt across the funnel, which Yoshida recalled was the signature of a Kang Enterprises vessel. Short on Korean history, the crane operator did not know that her name, Baekje, represented one or the early Korean tribal kingdoms that dominated the peninsula in the third century a.d.
    A pair of dockworkers was securing cables beneath an oblong object on the bed of a large flatbed truck when one of the men turned and greeted Yoshida as he approached.
    “Hey, Takeo, ever fly a submarine before?” the man yelled.
    Yoshida returned a confused look before realizing that the object on the back of the truck was a small white submersible.
    “Takagi says our shift is over once we get it aboard,” the man continued, displaying a missing front tooth as he spoke. “Lay it aboard and let’s go get some Sapporo’s.”
    “Is she secure?” Yoshida asked, waving a hand at the submersible.
    “All ready,” the second man replied eagerly, a young kid of nineteen ^ho Yoshida knew had just started work on the docks a few weeks before.
    A few yards away, Yoshida noticed a stocky bald man with dark eyes surveying the scene near the ship’s gangway. A menacing quality lingered over the man, Yoshida thought. He’d been in enough scrapes in the nearby shipyard bars to recognize which men were legitimate tough guys and which were pretenders. This man was no pretender, he judged.
    Shifting thoughts to the taste of a cold Sapporo beer, Yoshida climbed up a high ladder into the cab of the adjacent container crane and fired up its diesel motor. Adeptly working the levers like a concert pianist tickling the ivories, he expertly adjusted the movable boom and sliding block until satisfied, then dropped the hook and block quickly toward the ground, halting it dead center a few inches above the submersible. The two dockworkers quickly slipped a pair of cables over