The Devil's Playground Read online

Dawkins ordered over the wire to men waiting to pounce.

  "Hai," came the collective call of the Special Assault Team. Seeing that the three had now walked into the club, the team waited for the signal that would allow them to begin their assault. A signal that all the police team knew would link the three of them to the Yazuka, and give them all the evidence they needed to arrest them.

  Two months had been spent getting the listening devices into his various clubs in Osaka. It was painful and boring work. Now it was about bear fruit.

  "Ohikaenasutte," came over the wire. It was a word that all Yakuza always say to each other before they actually greet each other by the clasping of forearms that essentially shows duty and compassion. In an instant, the gesture linked the three together as members of his Clan.

  "Ohikanasutte," came the reply from the Malaysian and the travel agent in return. That was the cue Dawkins had been waiting for.

  "Hayaku," meaning 'quickly,' Sam ordered over the radio.

  Seconds later the assault team dressed head to toe in black and armed with Heckler & Koch MP5s burst into action. They pulled up outside the club in white vans. A second later they quickly exited from the vehicles and rammed the entrance with a battering ram before rushing teams of two into the club.

  The DEA agent watched anxiously as the action took place on the screen in front of him. Shouts of "get down" and machine gunfire ripped throughout the building and grenades quickly followed.

  "H?rudoappu," meaning 'hands up' followed by "Furoa" meaning 'floor' was shouted repeatedly around the club's floors as the police officers went room-to-room, shooting anybody who attempted to stop them or return fire. Five minutes later they emerged with their prisoners one by one to place them into the prison vans, some clad only in their trousers leaving their upper bodies and their different tattoos of dragons exposed.

  With the situation secure, Sam left the van and wandered down to the club. It had been a long six months and he couldn't wait to get home to see his wife and kids. Slowly he entered into what remained of the club. On the floor, directly in front of him, bound in flexi-cuffs behind their backs, were Yurijo Katayama and the Travel Agent. Neither man said a word. Instead, they just stared ahead as though they were in a trance.

  "I am sorry, Dawkins-San," the assault team leader said, shaking his head. "The Malaysian committed suicide."

  The experienced agent looked at the dead man's face. It had a pink or cherry-red look to it, a common effect of oxygen staying in the blood and not entering into the blood cells he knew instantly what it was. He had seen the same look on the faces of dead agents of the North Koreans when he had served in the MPs as a solider in Korea.

  "Cyanide," he said shaking his head.

  "The Yazuka doesn't usually act like that," said the young Squad Sergeant at Dawkins' side.

  "No, they don't, Junsabucho," answered a voice behind them in English but using the young police officer's rank in Japanese. Both men turned.

  What greeted them was the sight of a slim and slightly built man in his late forties wearing a white shirt, red tie, and blue suit with a Public Security Intelligence Agency badge known as the PSIA around his neck.

  "Yuzo Maeda," the man said, offering his hand to the DEA Agent.

  "Dawkins," the Special Agent replied, shaking his hand, before Maeda completed his answer to the young Sergeant's earlier statement.

  "North Koreans, however," he paused to take a look at the body, "do."

 

  O couldn't understand what the American or the Japanese, and the man he recognized as belonging to the PSIA were discussing because it was in English, and he only spoke Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean. He guessed by their body language that they were referring to the fact that his operative had committed suicide rather than be captured and risk torture.

  He realized he was in a difficult situation as it would be only a matter of time before the PSIA worked out he wasn't a member of Japan's Zainichi community as his cover identity suggested. He tried to focus his mind; with no diplomatic relations in place between the DPRK and Japan and with just the Chongryon, the group known as "The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan" to rely on to get a message back to Pyongyang to advise them of his capture, O quickly decided that his mission must come first.

  "If that means permanent silence and prison, then so be it and if it also means betraying all the men and women of the team in Osaka, then again, so be it," he decided. "Nothing is more important than MAE and his web of contacts and aides within the Japanese Government," he thought referring to the Hawk.

  2000

  The Kumicho of the Katayama-Gumi knew he was facing an uphill battle. The Supreme Court of Japan had just rejected in record time his latest appeal regarding the firearms offences, whilst the State Prosecutor was pushing to link him to the deaths of the rivals he had killed with his Katana ten years ago so he could assume his rightful position as the godfather of the Katayama-Gumi.

  The lawyers told him that if convicted it he would be facing a jail term of at least twenty-five years. That thought didn't bother him. The Clan and, thereby definition, he would survive and prosper. In fact, the Katayama-Gumi business operations were booming worldwide despite a disappointing start in the Americas.

  After the treachery of the Britisher and the American, he had dispatched a man whose loyalty would never be questioned to Mexico City with orders to establish direct links with the cartels of that wild country. After a few false starts, Shota Oshima, the man he had sent, did just that with the cartels of the Los Zetas and Beltr?n-Leyva Cartel.

  The Katayama-Gumi now supplied thirty percent of their partner's cooking meth and also, to great profit, actively supported the cartel's operations in the U.S. with transportation, kidnapping, and contract killing as when and where they were needed. The revenues in the region of $100,000,000 per year were outstanding.

  Because of that success, Yorijo supported and approved Shota's entry and into the headquarters of Katayama-Gumi and allowed the man to set up his own clan now known as Shota-Gumi.

  The Turkmenistan diplomat contact had also proved highly successful. Utilizing his links to the President and his enforcer Oleg Rejejow of Turkmenistan, the Katayama-Gumi now had a very successful amphetamine trafficking operation worth $60,000,000 per year and a supply route that once it left China saw it travel to Bangkok on to Ashgabat where it was re-distributed to partners in Turkey and Russia and all with its own state wrapper around it, making it untouchable.

  Despite this success in business, none of that really mattered to Yorijo Katayama; what did was the mission he had been given by the Supreme Leader.

  Using his collection of sources in Police and PSIA Yorijo had kept himself informed on his controller's incarceration. To date it appeared the only information, despite rigorous questioning that bordered on torture, that O Su Lee had given up was the betrayal of some disposable couriers that belonged to Chongryon.

  He knew why O had done this. It was an attempt to show the PSIA he was of limited value to them.

  "But the PSIA is a resourceful enemy!" he quietly reflected and because of this he knew it was only a matter of time before his controller cracked.

  He had also been told that the CIA had been putting pressure on the Interior Minister, a man he controlled through his addiction to whores and expensive luxury goods, to be allowed access to him to question him on North Korea's activities in South Korea.

  "He has displayed true Jingi," Yorijo said out loud, meaning 'Trust and loyalty' to him above all others. Now it was time to get him out and back home if only to protect his own mission, as ordering his death was not an option having discovered whom he was the son of.

  The handover of O to the North Koreans in exchange for Japanese prisoners was a simple affair. He was pushed onto the Mangyongbong-92 ferry by the PSIA officers without further comment. The reason for O's release was political although he didn't know that at the time.

  O thought it was becaus
e they had decided he held no more value to them when in fact his release had been designed to show the North Koreans a sign of good faith by way of a precursor to the talks between them over a possible visit by the Prime Minister of Japan to facilitate the normalization of relations between the two nations. What nobody knew was that Yorijo Katayama's political enforcers had organized and pressured the government ministers to make it happen.

  His arrival back home was a completely different matter although it wasn't recorded by state media it was given due repsect.

  When the tired and emotionally drained intelligence officer walked off the ferry to be met by his father Wonsu O Kang Ru in full uniform surrounded by his entourage in full dress uniform, including his father.

  "Welcome home Sangjwa," his father said with emotion in his eyes, using his rank with a formal salute.

  "Sangjwa?" O answered, confused. He was a major not a colonel in the Army.

  "Our Supreme Leader ordered the promotion," said his father as he expressively set about hugging him.

  "But I failed, honored father," O said with his tears in his eyes.

  "Nonsense my son," he said waving away his subordinates who were standing behind him so he could have a moment of privacy with his son, "You did your duty."

  "How?" asked the tear stricken O.

  "You protected the Mae and his network above all others," Wonsu O quietly said, hugging him. "Now