Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine Read online

  And he would lose his victory.

  Kinosuke Yoshida, leader of Japan's United Red Army, known and feared internationally as a demon of assassination and random terror, had invested a year in the planning of Hydra. Though the Russian, Fedorenko, had conceived the attack on America, and the Cuban, Munoz, had managed the shipments of chemicals and weapons, it was Yoshida who had assembled the army of terrorists.

  Crisscrossing the Middle East, he recruited young men and women from the Soviet camps in South Yemen, the Palestinian bases in northern Lebanon, the radical Muslim fortresses of Iran and Libya. He travelled through Europe to find the exiled survivors of the Uruguayan Tupamaros and the Argentine People's Revolutionary Army. He recruited members of the Italian Red Brigades and the German anarchist gangs.

  No other terrorist leader in the world could have recruited soldiers from such a spectrum of psychotics. Secrecy did not allow Yoshida to detail the attack, nor the weapons, nor the sponsors. He promised only an attack on America. The fanatics of the world knew Yoshida as a master terrorist utterly beyond politics. No treaty, no shuttling negotiator, no change in government leaders anywhere in the world would prompt the cancellation of his unnamed and mysterious project. The fanatics accepted his promise, joined Hydra without questions.

  For they knew Yoshida plotted and executed terror for the pleasure of murder, for the pleasure of seeing mass death.

  Before the terrorists reported to the isolated training camps, Yoshida purged his recruits. Soviet KGB officers reviewed the backgrounds of the men and women, cross-checking every detail and name in their past. Informers died. A Mossad agent disappeared. Assassins contracted from the Muslim Brotherhood murdered a CIA operative.

  Purified, his terrorists received coded instructions. zigzagging from one country to another while Yoshida and his personal assistants watched for surveillance, the terrorists finally assembled in isolated camps.

  To begin with, the terrorists were trained in languages and conventional assault weapons. Yoshida's men and Cuban DGI agents continued the purging of informers and agents. Only after months did the terrorist army receive its first training in chemical weapons.

  In the camps of the Soviet Union's worldwide military empire, where most post-cold-war terrorists received the know-how for their careers of murder and mayhem, KGB instructors would introduce their pupils to grenades and small bombs; advanced students, such as the IRA Provisionals, went on to study the fabrication of 100-kilogram bombs.

  But now, in the camps of Yoshida's army, the terrorists learned of chemical weapons, agents of death that required transportation by freighters and fleets of trucks. The scale of their mission dawned on the fanatics. They were not going to attack a government office. They were not going to hit a school bus filled with children. Not an airliner, nor a hundred airliners.

  Yoshida plotted the murder of cities. American cities. Millions of Americans.

  The army of terrorists came to share his lust. They became his disciples.

  Though he had not conceived of Hydra, the conspiracy of mass murder crowned the career of Kinosuke Yoshida. His lifelong rage at all living things would climax with the devastation of American cities.

  As a child playing in the gutters and ditches of post-war Tokyo, he tortured and killed small animals. In the fire-bombed ruins behind his mother's brothel, he knocked birds from the air with stones, opened their bodies and watched as ants ate the internal organs of the still-living birds. He trapped rats, then soaked them with gasoline; a touch of a match sent the rats fleeing from an agony they could not escape.

  Once, when his mother's bouncer threw a drunken pimp into the street, Yoshida stalked the man until he passed out in an alley. With a sharp piece of glass, he slashed the pimp's eyes. He ran away laughing as the blinded, screaming man thrashed in agony. Yoshida grew to be six feet tall, a giant in Japan. The taunts of other children, the stares of adults reinforced his psychopathic behaviour. He never abandoned his childhood fixation with torture and killing.

  As a teenager, his appearance and mental illness condemning him to the fringes of society, he joined , the criminal gangs ruling a devastated Tokyo: the Yakuza.

  Traditionally, the Yakuza controlled the Japanese underworld. In the sixteenth century, Iyeyasu Tokugawa unified Japan through military conquest. Chaos swept the cities and countryside as thousands of samurai of defeated lords wandered in search of new masters. Most of the samurai never found positions in other armies. Destitute, disillusioned, the warriors starved or accepted work as laborers.

  They took jobs in the labor gangs building the capital of Tokugawa Japan, Yedo—now known as Tokyo. The shogun's architects, as men of culture and art, had no experience in managing men who earned their rice with their muscles. It was gangsters from the gambling underworld who bossed the labor gangs that dug the ditches, cut the lumber and stone to fashion the stately temples and palaces of the overlords.

  Work camps had no law but the sword. The samurai-turned-laborers lived short, brutal lives, sweating for their money during the workdays, then drinking and gambling and whoring away their money during the nights.

  The gangster princes promoted the samurai to maintain discipline in the labor gangs. They introduced the warriors to the Seven Endurances of the Code of the Gambler: cold, heat, hunger, pain, imprisonment, generosity and willingness to sacrifice life. The Yakuza evolved from this chaos.

  In time, the Yakuza gangs became the spies and bodyguards of minor lords. Often, when lords from the remote regions travelled to the capital, they could not afford to bring their own samurai. Instead, they hired a retinue of Yakuza warriors for the procession into Yedo.

  The Yakuza also came to control any venture the nobility would not touch: prostitution, blackmail, assassination. For three hundred years, the Yakuza ruled the underworld without challenge.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, civil war again tore Japan. Following Commander Perry's forced introduction of foreign ideas and technology, the leaders of Japan debated the future of their nation. Conservative lords wanted their people to continue in their traditional isolation, to live without technology, without the contamination of barbarian concepts such as liberty, equality, or the rule of law.

  Other Japanese wanted the end of the shogun's absolute rule, the end of the rigid womb-to-grave caste system, and the entry of their nation into the modern world.

  Military forces loyal to the emperor destroyed the shogunate. With the restoration of the Meji Emperor, thousands of defeated samurai swelled the ranks of the Yakuza. Ironically, the criminal class of the Yakuza became the most conservative faction of Japanese society. They preserved the traditions of the samurai and the feudal past.

  When the American Armed Forces destroyed the Tojo military regime, the Yakuza ruled the devastated cities. The underworld lords commanded the police. Businessmen took Yakuza as partners, for only the Yakuza had money to invest. And the Yakuza, through their banks and their ruthless soldiers, controlled the central industries vital to the reconstruction of the cities: lumber, stone, concrete, steel, labor.

  The Yakuza banked billions of yen and American dollars. Acting as fronts for the underworld, the banks then loaned the billions to the Yakuza's partners in the emerging corporations of Japan. The ancient society of pimps, gamblers, extortionists, and assassins thus extended their domain to the quiet boardrooms of Japan, Inc.

  But Kinosuke Yoshida did not join the Yakuza to participate in the economic miracle of post-war Japan. He did not lust after money.

  Yoshida desired only blood and horror.

  The street hoods who employed him recognized his natural talents. Subsidizing his karate and kendo studies, training him in the use of pistols and rifles, they used him to exact revenge on other petty hoods. He accepted assignments revolting even to rapists and murderers.

  Once, to halt a rival gang's grab at the prostitution profits of a slum district, Yoshida's boss ordered him to kidnap one of the gang's leaders and somehow terroriz
e the gang. He left the technique to the imagination of Yoshida. The kidnap occurred, and a series of notes told the rival gang where they could find their leader. They rushed from place to place. They found an arm, a leg, the other arm, the other leg, finally stumbling onto the screaming, dying hulk of their commander. As a joke, Yoshida left it to the leader's own men to grant him the mercy of death.

  When he did this, he had not yet celebrated his sixteenth birthday.

  As he became a young man, proficient in the martial arts and possessing the unnatural strength of a fanatic, yet also a cold, calculating intelligence uncommon in the underworld, he gained the notice of Yakuza lords who had transcended their criminal origins to attain executive positions in Japanese financial corporations.

  In the early 1960s, Communist and anarchist riots disrupted Japanese society. These riots disgusted the Yakuza lords. The radicals' politics offended the traditions sacred to conservative Japanese. The influence of the Soviet Union and Maoist China frightened all Japanese.

  In response to the affront of the riots and to protect their vast wealth from any possible Communist victory, the Yakuza executives sent Yoshida to intimidate the radicals.

  A propagandist who denounced the emperor from Communist podiums died with a microphone jammed down her throat.

  A Red shock-trooper, known for his violent assaults on police, received a tiny wound in his neck vertebrae from a rusty needle. The resulting infection left the radical leader a quadriplegic.

  A leader whose face appeared almost daily on the front pages of radical newspapers disappeared. The next day, a thick envelope arrived at a newspaper office. The envelope contained the leader's face.

  But the mutilations and murders accomplished nothing. The Left continued disrupting Japanese universities. Students and radicals protesting one cause or another generated newspaper and television news throughout the decade. If right-wing thugs broke a loudmouthed student's legs or assassinated a Communist Party leader, another radical took his place. The Yakuza lords abandoned their campaign of terror against the radicals. Yoshida returned to assassinating upstart hoods.

  Yet he continued attending the rallies, watching the riots of the Communists. The radicals fascinated Yoshida. He admired their seething rage. Though the young Communists offered many reasons why they despised the Japanese culture and people, Yoshida saw through their polemics. Like himself, they only wanted to destroy. They used politics as he used the Yakuza: as a means to fulfil their desires. They had no interest in the political process, they only wanted to destroy.

  Yoshida had no interest in criminal profits, he wanted only to murder.

  Then came international terrorism. Yoshida abandoned the Yakuza without a thought, to join the ultraradical United Red Army of Japan.

  The Communist governments of North Korea and South Yemen welcomed Yoshida to their "freedom fighter" training camps. He accepted basic instruction in weapons and explosives, but told his instructors nothing of his past. Later, in the classes of unarmed combat and interrogation, his natural abilities and experience betrayed him as a professional.

  Assuming their pupil to be a common criminal from the slums of Japan, the Cuban and Palestinian and Soviet teachers—themselves masters in torture and murder—selected Yoshida for intensive training.

  He surprised them. He advanced so rapidly in his studies, and demonstrated such skill in assassination and combat and torture, that the camp administrators seriously doubted his teachers' reports.

  Yoshida's first assignment proved his teachers correct beyond question.

  He had travelled to Beirut to spend three weeks watching a Kuwaiti prince. Posing as a Japanese businessman, he persuaded the Kuwaiti to invite him to his fortified office complex. With only his hands, Yoshida killed the prince's personal bodyguards, seized the prince and fought his way out of the fortress. Kuwait secretly paid a ten-million-dollar ransom to Al Fatah. The United Red Army received a five-million-dollar share.

  Now a hero of the Revolution, Yoshida became a leader. Under the leadership of two other alumni of the Soviet terror schools, Ilich Sanchez—or "Carlos the Jackal"—and Zeko Tanaga, Yoshida planned the United Red Army's attack on Israel's Lod International Airport in Tel Aviv. In solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution, three Japanese gunmen murdered twenty-seven people, wounded seventy-eight others. Most of the dead and wounded were Puerto Rican Catholics on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Jesus.

  The Arab world ComBloc nations hailed the outrage as a great victory of the Japanese Communist "freedom fighters" over the Zionists.

  Yoshida remained a shadowy figure in the maelstrom of international terror. Though he crafted victory after victory, he had no interest in following his soldiers on their suicidal missions. He studied the world, found his targets, formed the kill squads. He watched his dramas in lurid video as his Japanese and Palestinian and European soldiers achieved glorious martyrdom on international prime-time television.

  Then Fedorenko brought Yoshida the concept of Hydra.

  MIDWAY BETWEEN THE FLORIDA KEYS and the Archipelago de Sabana-Camaguey, Yoshida approached the yacht to meet with his co-conspirator, Jorge Munoz y Villamor, an officer in the Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI) of the People's Republic of Cuba.

  At the helm of the power cruiser, Kuzi backed off on the throttle and cranked the wheel hard to the right. The cruiser bobbed to a perfect stop, the port rail bumping against the yacht's hull as the two pleasure craft rose and fell with the light wind-chop.

  Cubans stepped down from the yacht to lash the craft together. Kampei continued monitoring the Coast Guard frequencies as Yoshida and Kizu, the bodyguard carrying an Uzi, climbed up to the yacht.

  "Comrade!"

  Munoz attempted to greet Yoshida with an abrazo, the macho embrace of friendship between Hispanic men. Yoshida avoided the Cuban's embrace, gave him only a perfunctory nod. He nodded also to the Palestinian beside Munoz, Saeb Shyein, an Al Fatah liaison officer. Shyein knew Yoshida well; he made no attempt to even shake hands.

  The Japanese terror-master never allowed any man or woman to touch him. He considered it a violation of his personal security.

  Yoshida opened the meeting without wasting words. "Anything from the Americans?"

  "Let us have our conversation in the comfort of the cabin."

  "One moment." Yoshida glanced at Kizu. They watched as Kizu went ahead into the yacht's cabin. After a minute, the bodyguard returned; he nodded to Yoshida. Only then did Yoshida follow Munoz and Shyein down the narrow stairs. Kizu remained on the deck, watching the crewmen.

  "Senor Yoshida," Munoz commented, "the distrust of one's comrades in revolution only strengthens the forces of empire and fascism—"

  "Any word from the Americans?" Yoshida repeated, sitting on a leather bench seat in the walnut-and-brass cabin. He looked at the tray of American and European liqueurs on the table, took nothing.

  Shyein, the Palestinian, disregarded his Islamic prohibitions and poured himself a half glass of bourbon, with ice.

  "Not yet," Munoz answered.

  "Any movement in their armies?" the Japanese asked.

  "It is too soon. But the surrender will come. Even they will see the futility of resistance to our—"

  "How much money have your Cubans taken?" Yoshida interrupted.

  "From the dope gangs? Millions. My men struck everywhere in the Western Hemisphere. They have taken over twenty million dollars in the past week. Already, I have transferred much of the money to our allies in the United States."

  "Mercenaries!" Shyein cursed. "Americans sell themselves like Jew whores."

  "Amigo," said Munoz, "our comrades the Black Liberation Army, the FALN, the Chicano Mexicanos—they all need funds to operate. In the Russian struggle, remember, Lenin operated on funds seized from the czarist banks. But the FBI storm troopers of repression in the United States are far more efficient, far more dangerous. Our friends suffer many casualties with every attempted expropriation—"

&nb
sp; "But will dollars buy bravery and sacrifice?" Shyein demanded.

  "It will." Munoz smiled. "I gave them only down payments. If they do not fight, they will not be paid."

  Shyein gulped bourbon, splashed more into his glass. "If they fail us, they die."

  Munoz laughed. "That is understood."

  Yoshida stopped the argument. "And the Russian. When does he return? When do we meet again?"

  "Security does not allow another meeting," Munoz told him.

  "We agreed to meet again before the deadline." The Cuban shrugged. "Things change."

  Yoshida stared at Munoz for a long moment. He knew the Cuban lied. The talk of security did not mean they feared the Americans. Munoz and Fedorenko feared him, Yoshida the warrior. As they should, for he despised them.

  Munoz, the bureaucrat, the accountant, the pretender to Revolution who mouthed slogans and posed for photos with his gray-beard leaders; Fedorenko, the Russian who played chess for relaxation, who read French novels, who enjoyed the ballet. They thought they could save themselves from the flashing blade of his hatred. But Yoshida the warrior despised them.

  Yoshida felt the sea salt crusted on his face crack as he smiled. "Yes. Things change."

  "Tell me, how goes it with the many fighting groups?" Munoz asked him.

  "As we planned. In the movements of the fighter, there has been no change." Yoshida stood. He looked to the Palestinian. "Come. I return to Miami now."

  Gulping down the last of his bourbon, Shyein staggered to the deck. A Cuban crewman handed him a suitcase and a vinyl case the shape of a Kalashnikov. Kizu helped the Palestinian down to the deck of the power cruiser. Munoz waved goodbye. "Adios, my Japanese comrade. And Shyein! Give my regards to my Cuban brothers, wish them luck for me."

  "Victory to the People!" the Palestinian called out as the cruiser's engine roared. Like a tourist departing on a world voyage, he stood on the flying bridge waving until they left the yacht far behind. Then his drunken grin dropped. Turning to Yoshida, his face twisted into a sneer. "That Cuban dog. That coward. He is like an old woman with his books and computers. He knows nothing of war. He should be a Jew shopkeeper."