Wheeler smiled to himself, “this placid Asian poontang is beyond belief.” He was very much of the camp that held that Asia was a man’s world.
“Sir, I will return to your suite after you have dressed. I am sorry for the interruption, sir. I will dress now, I will not take long, sir.”
Wheeler actually laughed at that statement, as Miyuki darted into the bathroom.
Miyuki opened the bathroom door in less than a minute. Back to prim kindergarten teacher, Miyuki bowed.
“Honey, that must be a world record for any woman to get dressed.” Wheeler said.
“Please tell me if you need me again, at any time, sir. I am always available for you, sir. I love it here and will do anything to stay here, sir.”
Miyuki left; after closing the Commandant’s door, she replaced the two squares of thin foam rubber. Thus started an illicit affair that Miyuki had been dreaming about for five years, and it was a partnership made in heaven—the tall, rich, strapping Texan commander of the most important club in the Islands with the soft, gentle, but intensely physical, young, placid, Japanese servant girl.
More importantly, it was the activation of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s single most important agent. The intelligence gathered by Miyuki from the gregarious and boastful American was so valuable, and her position so critical, that she had not one but two cut outs, and no radio traffic was ever used. She never liked radio and she especially hated radio men, who she found to be uniformly unreliable as well as congenitally nervous—what was it, the electrons? Instead, a special protocol was used whereby her coded messages were passed by the second cut out to a fishing boat that would pass the package to a submarine. And this only occurred when there were completely clear days so the “fishermen” could scour the skies with their high-powered binoculars before banging a submerged brass bell with a hammer to tell the submarine the exchange could safely be made.
Miyuki’s material was of astonishing importance—she was even able to glean some of fragments of King’s and Nimitz’s top-level strategic thinking. In Tokyo, Yamamato himself was heard to comment that it was like having a frank, professional conversation with Admirals King and Nimitz over brandy and cigars at the Palace Hotel.
Yet this was not the most valuable achievement Miyuki performed. For that would occur on the actual day of Operation Z.
On that seminal first Sunday in December, Miyuki put on a freshly starched white uniform and took her bicycle to ride the hour to the Officers’ Club. She was sure the always-late bus to the Officer’s Club would not appear due to the day’s mayhem, and this suited her purpose. The first part of the ride was easy, around the coast road, then the climb started and it became steeper and steeper. Half way up the climb, she dismounted and paused. Through years of training, she instinctively gasped at what she saw and drew her hand to her mouth, just as a plain person would have done when confronted with such scenes of destruction and devastation.
“You’re always being watched,” her trainer in Tokyo had repeated and repeated.
“Never let your guard down until you are again on Japanese soil.”
So she went through the ritual of mopping her brow, of putting her arms akimbo and stretching her lower back, of tsk’ing to herself. But throughout this charade, her sole professional interest was the fuel tanks. This gargantuan farm of tanks held sufficient fuel for all ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet for six months. Think of it, six months, or twice as much fuel as her poor homeland possessed. And through the smoke, Miyuki saw all the tanks, pristine and intact—the Japanese attack had failed.
Miyuki slowly turned her bicycle—“you are always being watched”—and rode back down the coast road. She did not stop at the three cinder block billets, but rather continued until she reached the abandoned fishing village. It was more a small hamlet of five or six tumble-down shacks where nine years ago some local fishermen with the unenthusiastic backing of some local investors planned to start a pearling operation. Of course, the combination of lack of capital and the native Hawaiians aversion to anything that even approached work doomed the cockamamie scheme from the start. But three years ago, the quietness and absolute stillness had caught the eye of an agent of the caliber of Miyuki.
She dismounted and placed her bicycle out of sight behind the first shack. She then walked to the second shack and entered. It smelled of feral cats. It was dark and dank—almost no sunlight entered. She opened the front window a fraction and sat there on a wooden crate, listening for five minutes. As her ears slowly became accustomed to the quietness, she heard nothing apart from a far-off sound of a siren wailing out the end of an era.
After ten more minutes, when she was satisfied the hamlet was deserted, she struggled to push the heavy cast iron table in the center of the room to one side. She knelt on the floor and brushed away the dirt she had placed there. She removed the outer board and was presented with the sight of a large steel padlock. Unlocking the padlock, she removed her treasure, a treasure for which she would give her life, or the life of her first son. Gently, she removed the radio set and went through the starting procedures. Machinery and radio valves always intimidated her, but she had overcome this fear; she had to succeed, so she did.
She strung the aerial wire. Once the radio set was warmed up and operational, she started typing in Morse, “181-79,” over and over again. She had to get the message through and this message was so important that a code cypher was not sufficient—encrypted text could always be cracked, whereas a one-time book was infallible, albeit limited. One hundred and eighty-one was her agent number; 79 was the message—“oil tanks not destroyed.” After only 30 seconds, her heart leapt, “SN”—“message understood,” and the code of Yamamoto’s signal ship.
Her career was over. No champagne, no syrupy speeches, no silly parties, just the satisfaction of knowing that she had done it.
She turned off the radio set, removing the radio tubes—she had to use her handkerchief because they were so hot. She smashed each one in turn. She spent ten minutes destroying the rest of the radio. She removed the two small drums of fuel she had cached in the room five months earlier and splashed all of the inside of the shack. Her final act was to remove the strike-anywhere matches from the cache. Before striking the match, she paused by the front window, more out of tradecraft than out of necessity. Hearing nothing, she opened the front door, struck the match and put it to one of the soaked rags.
Walking away without looking back, Miyuki retrieved her bicycle.
Miyuki returned to her billet. She went into the first building where the hated local Hawaiians lived. My God it was a shambles. No wonder Wheeler had fancied her—what man in his right mind would want to stick his thing into one of these native women?
To her surprise (and delight), the two girls in the common room ran to her and embraced her,
“Sister Miyuki, help us; what are we to do; are the Japanese coming? Help us sister, we love you; help us, please.”
Miyuki considered a sarcastic tone, but instantly realized that would not work with this local peasant stock.
“Girls, all will be fine; let’s have tea.”
“Tea, yes. Tea. Why did we not think of that? Yes, tea would be wonderful.”
The babbling continued and eventually tea was made.