The Day of the Iddhi (part 2)

by Suhotra Swami


“In Buddhism, dharma means the true nature of reality. Nagarjuna taught that this true nature seems different to different observers because there are different levels of understanding the dharma. There is the level of the eye of flesh. When one searches for the Jewel Island of Peace, he can’t locate it. Only pain can be found by that eye. One must raise the vision higher. Next one seeks the Jewel Island with the eye of dharma. One sees the ethics of Buddha and by clinging to them, puts an end to pain. But by clinging to the moral codes of embodied life, one still cannot enter the Island of Nirvana, the complete peace of the ultimate truth. One must raise his vision higher still, to the eye of wisdom. At this level one no longer clings to rupa, the form of the physical body, even for doing good. One sees that form is of the same nature (dharma) as arupa, and that vidya is of the same nature as avidya. Nagarjuna compares the eye of wisdom to the akasha (ethereal space), which exhibits no form, yet includes every possible form. Still, even this level of vision is not the highest. It depends on mental analysis. By discerning dharma with the mundane mind one attains dharma-lakshana, the external features of the real. One must go beyond lakshana to the source, or essence (dhatu). Dharma-dhatu, the Jewel Island of Nirvana, is visible only through the eye of the Buddha. To receive this eye, one must accept the dharma-kaya, the body of the Buddha.”    

            Yamato put his teacup down and gazed off into some phantom landscape. Then he leaned forward on his desk and pressed his palms into his forehead. When he looked at Wiederoy again, his eyes were rimmed with red.

            His characteristic raspy whisper seemed to have a sharper edge to it. Wiederoy sensed that what Yamato would tell him next was of great importance to him.

            “What I’m talking about here is transmundane consciousness. That is how the essential nature of reality—the ultimate information-code beyond what we see with the eyes in our heads, beyond the moral compass that tells right from wrong, beyond even metaphysics—is revealed. To use the Pali word, one must be an iddhi. That means a perfected being, possessed with a consciousness that reaches further into the true nature of reality than can the consciousness of people who are merely sensual, or moral, or intellectual. Or all three.

            Yamato raised a cautionary finger. “But there’s always been a problem. In history, time and time again, politicians trample consciousness with jackboots to keep it down at the sensual, moral and philosophical level. You know, I read something a few days back in Reader’s Digest. You’ve been to college. I guess you know about the Reichstag Fire in Berlin, 1933.”

            “Yessir. The Reichstag was the German parliament. Someone set it ablaze one night not long after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. He used this incident as an excuse to crack down on all civil liberties in the country. That’s how he went from being a regular politician in a democratic system to the dictator of a totalitarian state.”

            “Exactly. For whatever it’s worth, the Digest ran a sidebar in an article about the Reichstag fire. It was about a man named Erik Hanussen. He was widely reputed in Germany as a clairvoyant—you know? Supposedly he foresaw the future. Parapsychologists call it precognition. At least he was very good at convincing crowds he had that power. The Digest said he became a pet of the Nazi leadership as early as the ’20s because he foretold Hitler’s rise to power—which did happen, but only in January 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

            “A month later, on 24 February, Hanussen announced that he’d had a vision of a great house on fire that would result in a popular uprising all around the country. That was three days before the Reichstag incident. Since the public was well aware Hanussen was close to the Nazi Party, tongues started wagging as to whether Hanussen really predicted the fire or just already knew about a plan the Nazis’ had up their sleeves to  burn down the Parliament and blame it on the communists. For its part, the German Communist Party did a good job of convincing the world they were framed. Three months later, Hanussen’s body was found in a ditch a few miles east of Berlin.”

            Captain Yamato’s thoughts again carried him off. He sipped his tea a while. Wiederoy, sensing that things would move in an even stranger direction, could only think to himself, “Curiouser and curiouser.”  

            At last the captain continued. “Hanussen was a professional magician. He not only foretold events, he demonstrated that he could see the objects people had in their pockets. The police used him as a crime-solving psychic. He was a knife-thrower and a fire-eater too. It’s all very well to argue he was an ordinary stage conjurer with no genuine supernatural powers. Regardless, he had the reputation of a magician. For politicians who build empires upon lies, that may be enough to put a fear into them that believe that only wicked deeds will keep their heads on their shoulders. They know only one thing about the truth—it is mighty, and therefore dangerous. Magicians, psychics, prophets, soothsayers are feared because of their reputation for seeing further, of being more conscious. When you trace back the origin of the word magic as far back as you can go, you come to the Old Persian word magus (‘mighty one’). Truth exists, lies are invented. One who knows this is the true magus. Like the prophets of old, he can bring down an invented civilization with just a single word of truth.”  

            Wiederoy was caught off-guard when all at once the Captain asked about a name. The sudden change of subject forced Charles, for the first tine since they’d known each other, to ask Yamato to repeat himself.

            “Wiederoy. Your name. What is it? German? Dutch?”

            “Well, sir, according to what my Dad told my Mom, it started as a Norman-French name, Vidarleroi, “Vidar the King.” Vidar goes back to Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. Vidar is the name of the son of Odin who avenges his father by killing the Fenris Wolf. When the Vikings settled in Normandy, they started speaking French. It’s said they found it a classier language. By the same token, someone among my Dad’s ancestors thought Vidarleroi sounded better than Kungvidar or whatever it was originally. The passage of time and my Dad’s ancestors’ migrating to new places turned Vidarleroi into Wiederoy.”

            “Ah,” Yamato mused. “You know, as a kid I had to take what I guess you’d call catechism in Pure Land Buddhism.” His voice, normally a forcible hiss, became airy with nostalgia. “That was at the Jodo Temple in L.A.’s Little Tokyo. I even had to take two years of Sanskrit. For the sake of my mother I also had to take two years of Latin, at a Catholic Sunday school.

            “But anyway. For two years, every Monday evening at the Pure Land class, we had to recite a prayer called the Kammuryoju-kyo. And on Wednesdays and Fridays we had to study its Sanskrit back-translation, the Amitayur-dhyana-sutra.

            “You know, it’s funny, Charles, that around the same time I was learning Sanskrit, I read the story of Vidar. Used to love those Viking myths. They’re so much like our own Samurai tales. Anyway, one version of the saga is that Vidar grabs the Fenris Wolf by its upper and lower jaws and pulls his mouth apart. Like King Kong does to that Tyrannosaurus Rex? Remember that? Anyway, check this out. There’s this Sanskrit word, vidara, which means ‘to tear apart.’  Vidara—Vidar—Wiederoy. Pretty cool, Lieutenant. Hey, seems to me I remember that Vidar becomes the deity of the golden age that follows Ragnarok, the fall of the Norse gods.”

            Charles smiled a little sadly and shrugged. On any other occasion he’d be interested, but this was hardly the time for that.

            “I’m not saying I know for sure that Wiederoy relates back to vidara, but your Dad told your Mom it comes from Vidar. There’s magic in names, is what I’m telling you. You know, in Japan there’s a practice of connecting with magical beings through sound. It’s called kotodama, ‘sound-spirit.’

            “There was a time when, in all cultures, people believed that sounds can evoke spiritual powers latent within our bodies, minds, and souls. For example, according to the Japanese tradition, raiju, the spirit of lightning or fire, is not only in the sky. It’s located in the navel. So in a sense, raiju corresponds to the third cakra of the Indian yoga system—the navel center called manipuraka. This chakra’s element is fire, and its sound is ram. Raiju, ram. The seed-sound ra is an indicator of the sun or fire. The ancient Greeks had a different name for the navel region—cholos. No ra phoneme that we know of. But still, cholos was known to Greek warriors as the spirit of wrath. Wrath is a flaming emotional state. That’s why at one point in The Illiad Paris told Hector he couldn’t sit down, because the Trojans had aggravated his cholos.

            “The sound-spirit of different regions of the bodily microcosm or the universal macrocosm can reveal itself in the form of an animal, or even a number of animals. The Japanese believe that raiju, for example, may appear as a cat. The semblance with lightning is that sometimes it leaps from tree to tree, just as a cat may do.

            “Ryu-o is the heavenly dragon king. That’s the animal form of the sound. Ryu-o also refers to the truth of clear cosmic consciousness. The ancient Egyptians worshiped a dragon of heaven too. Its body formed the archway of the sky along which the sun and moon journey. In Egypt the dragon of heaven was addressed as Ka-en-ankh Nereru. According to India’s sacred epic, Mahabharata, the same arch of heaven is known as the Marut (wind or storm god) named Ahirbudhnya. Ahirbudhnya is a naga, a celestial serpent. The sun and moon that travel along the heavenly path that is a gigantic serpent are the two eyes of God’s universal form. So, like Ryu-o, Ahirbudhnya is the truth of cosmic consciousness. Another interesting parallel is that Ahirbudhnya is not different from Seshnaga Ananta. This is a gigantic snake or dragon that dwells at the bottom of the ocean from where He rules the flow of what some mystics call the Draconic Current, which sustains everything. Holds it all together. In Japan the sound for the ocean dragon king is Ryujin.”     

            All at once Yamato was eyeing him with curious calmness. “You like the tea? It comes as a gift from Iruma, you know…”

            “Yes, you’ve told me, Captain Yamato. It’s from the JDF.” He felt his face flush.

            Silence.

            “Excuse me sir, ah…”

            “What is it, Lieutenant?”

            “That was quite a…er…loxodromic little voyage you just took me on.”

            Yamoto leaned back and studied him thoughtfully. “Lox-o-drom-ic,” he repeated the strange word, savoring each syllable. “You know what I’m gonna ask you next.”

            Wiederoy explained, using his hands to illustrate his words. “It’s an old naval term. In the days before sailboats were as sleek in the water as they are now, equipped with today’s deep keels, if they caught wind from the side but the helmsman kept straight a course as he could, the boat’s tipped so far over that you’d think the weight of its mast just might spill it into the ocean. The boat can’t stay a trimmed course tipped over like that. It has to move at an oblique angle. That’s loxodromic. This little narrative you just related, Captain. If I may say so, it’s rather oblique.”

            Yamoto grinned sardonically as he poured himself another cup of Sayama tea. “It’s going to take you a long time, Wiederoy, a long, long time. Things are never as simple as they seem—not in this business, anyway. You’ve got to start finding the wheels inside the wheels.”

            Wiederoy sat straighter in his seat, alert. Where’s the Captain taking this?

            “‘To each soul’—it’s another line from Heraclitus—“‘belongs a report that increases itself.’ See, Charles, he’s talking about consciousness expansion. It’s ironic that you walked in here this morning with the intention of reporting to me about recent developments. But it’s been me reporting to you. And now my report is about to increase. a little more.   

                         

            Queasiness crept up Wiederoy’s esophagus as he watched this man, his superior officer, fall apart. It had to stop now. He’d been sent to Okinawa specifically to check up on Yamato. And he’d grown to like and even trust his so-called boss. Even this tape he was inclined to pass it off as nothing more than a recording of Yamato’s own undercover work. But he’d gotten word last night from Roy Earle, who was in Taiwan right now under ONI deep cover. “Yamato is up fudge creek without a popsicle stick, and your tape is what we need to prove it. Just put a cap on the mess he’s making by confronting him with it. But be ready for trouble.”  When he walked into the CO’s office this morning, Wiederoy was feeling sorry for the man. But now the Yamato’s increasingly loopy ambiage had stretched his patience past all limits.

            “Sir,” said Wiederoy wearily, “speaking of the opinion of a superior officer, Commodore Haines has heard this tape already. He signed a warrant for your arrest.”

            Yamato’s herpetine eyes bulged, their black pupils pixilating with iridescent sparkles of green and yellow. The desperate humanity that clung to them during his laborious exposition on Erik Hanussen and magpies and the elastic racial policies of the Third Reich had by now deliquesced.

            “Wiederoy.” Yamato’s voice was almost inaudible. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “At the phenomenal fringe of this kinematic experience you and I are taking to be reality, there is something at work that defies formulation. It has no name. Its existence I can only surmise.”

            With an anguished cry the captain lunged across his desk, his left hand scrabbling for Wiederoy’s starched military tie while his right hand came up in a fist. Wiederoy’s nervous system was instantly electrified by adrenalin, training, and the emotionless logic of stopping an attacker. He jerked back in his chair, keeping himself just out of the Captain’s grasp. This forced Yamato to half-rise from his seat and awkwardly bend his body forward so that his fingers might close the gap. Wiederoy seized his superior officer’s left hand with his own and, by twisting leftward at the wrist as far as he could, he immoblized it.  Pressing the hand against his shirtfront, he held it fast. At the same time he swung his body leftward in his swivel-chair, throwing the captain off balance. That motion led fluidly into the bringing down of his right elbow hard into the crook of Yamato’s extended arm. His CO’s face and chest bobbed above the desk as he struggled to get free while Wiederoy kept turning leftward. In order to halt the sudden drop of his own face into the varnished walnut surface, Yamato was forced to strike his right fist into the desktop instead of into Wiederoy’s face.

            Maintaining his tight grip on Yamato’s twisted left wrist, the leftward spin of his still-seated body, and the downward drive of his right elbow, Wiederoy effortlessly broke his CO’s wrist. Screaming in pain, Yamato reared up to receive a lightning strike in the right eye from Wiederoy’s right fist. The force of the punch came not only from the Lieutenant’s elbow joint and shoulder that snapped out straight from their fold deep in the crook of Yamato’s arm, but also from his right foot that served as the mainspring of his whole body’s sudden leap onto the desk. As he came over he swiftly seized Yamato’s throat with his left hand and drew his right back to his ear in a cocked fist. Yamato fell back into his chair, the front legs leaving the floor. His arms flailed like a broken-winged bird as he tried to keep his balance.

            Wiederoy had landed on his haunches. He instantly uncoiled his taut leg muscles, shooting his body onward. As he entered Yamato’s space his fingertips dug deep into the Captain’s windpipe. For an instant he used that grip to jerk his head forward, confusing Yamato as to his intentions.  By making sure that the captain was pulled toward him for just an instant, he momentarily arrested the Captain’s backward fall to the floor. That teetering split-second was all Wiederoy needed to ball up his own body by folding his knees up to his chest in mid-air. But it was with his knees on Yamato’s chest that he landed, driving him into the floor and slamming all the wind out of his lungs. Wiederoy stopped him from refilling his chest with his left hand, now a vise that squeezed shut his opponent’s windpipe. At the exact instant the back of the Captain’s head collided with the floorboards, Wiederoy’s right fist hammered the bridge of his nose. Before his CO could collect his wits, Wiederoy, catlike, leaped away from the Captain’s body onto his feet and stood ready. But Yamato just lay on his back gasping like a beached mackerel, left eye staring upward at nothing, right eye purple and closing, nose misshapen and bleeding, his legs splayed around the seat of his upended chair.  His broken left wrist was flung out to the side; his right arm was folded at the elbow beneath his body and the chairback..    

            Now that Wiederoy looked down upon the Captain after that bit of excitement, he felt little regret for him. In those days he believed that being directed from above to do what he did that day was a means of stripping his eyes of the scales that hid the naked evil of a fallen world. In this way Wiederoy was both soldier and a Gnostic-in-the-making.

            From his mother he had inherited a penchant for deinosis, the envisioning of life at its most hideous. She believed the material world to be inherently an evil place. The only escape from its evil was by the mystical transformation of matter to spirit by sacrifice (from the Latin sacer facere, “to make sacred”). The true nature of sacrifice—Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross—was one of mystery, not ritual. Wiederoy thought he had found the mystery of sacrifice in his work with the ONI.

            Yamato began to laugh. Even then it was just a whisper, the mere ghost of mirth. Wiederoy eyed his CO carefully. He hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d fallen.

            “Wiederoy,” rasped the Captain between chuckles. “Hey, Wiederoy. Remember this: ‘And nine’s the devil his own self.’ They’re not going to let us get away with it. The magi…the cuckoos...they’re mad at us for what we’ve been doing to them…for centuries.. And believe me, they’ve got the power to get their revenge.” He paused, and laughed again. “I could have helped stop that. But I work for idiots. Tell Haines and Earle and all those guys to shed no tears. I won’t be any more dead than they’ve been for years.” His right arm came out from behind his back with a Colt .45 military-issue pistol in the hand. Yamato shoved the muzzle into his still-laughing mouth and pulled the trigger. Wiederoy flinched at the sound, turned his back on the red spray, and reached for the phone. 

            In a world ignorant of—or too stiff-necked to embrace—the inner spirit of sacrificial transformation in the stead of outward liturgical formalities, the logic of the moral distinction between good and evil breaks down into contradiction. How often had Wiederoy heard from his mother Laima’s mouth the lament of a woman whose faith was a relic of a Catholicism stabbed in the back over a millennia ago? “Ash buvau keistoule shalyje, taip ilgai,” she would mutter in the language of the old country. “I have been for so long a stranger in a strange land.”

            His superiors, crew-cut gray-heads—whose stern faces were deeply lined from years of feeding the blazes under the bubbling saucepans of small wars on the front burners even as they anxiously tended the back flame so that the Big War never got hotter than a simmer—found Lieutenant Charles P.R. Wiederoy interesting. Some of their small wars, like Vietnam, had been just too open to the public for America’s good. Intelligence agencies are at their best in small wars waged under deep cover. The deeper the cover, the less the moral logic of civilization applies. This was where Lieutenant Charles Wiederoy’s budding Gnosticism fit right in. It became the germ for Project Rathramnus.  

            The Ryukyu-Shoto is a 650-kilometer long chain of islands that extends southwest from Kyushu, southern Japan, to the tip of Taiwan. Before 1868, the Ryukyus formed a semi-independent kingdom ruled from Okinawa. Thereafter it became a ken or prefecture of the Empire of Japan. Their new rulers obliged the Ryukyu islanders to learn Japanese, since their own language was unintelligible to anyone but Okinawans.

            In April 1945 one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War’s Pacific Theater was fought on Okinawa between the forces of the United States and Japan. For decades after the Ryukyu-Shoto was under the sole control of the American occupation government. By 1972 the entire chain had been returned to Japanese administration. However, through the end of the Twentieth Century, the U.S. maintained eighty-eight military bases and thousands of troops in the Ryukyus.

            We may note that the figure “eighty-eight” included only military bases that were publicly acknowledged by America and Japan. We may further note that since its formation in 1952, the NSA (National Security Agency) has maintained absolutely no contact with the American public and news media, giving rise to the joke that NSA stands for “No Such Agency.” It is likewise noteworthy that the U.S. Air Force never directly acknowledged the existence of its top secret facility at Groom Lake, Nevada—a land area as big as a Benelux nation, above which 4,742 miles of air space were forbidden to all civilian air traffic and even to military aircraft from other bases. Wild rumors abounded about what the government was really up to at this place, known to the public by such names as Area 51, Dreamland, The Box, The Ranch, and The Remote Location.

            No doubt some secretive purpose was served there, but exactly what, the government never revealed.  Returning again to the Ryukyus, here too there was at least one top secret, unacknowledged U.S. military installation. For the sake of this narration it shall be called Base 89. What it was called on the inside we shall probably never know, for unlike the NSA and Area 51, Base 89—the tiny island of Kawazaruna—remained a complete secret to all but a tiny fraction of  the intelligence personnel of the United States and Japan.

            Like other very small islands in the Ryukyu chain, Kawazaruna never had a civilian population. Two years before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, she constructed a high-security submarine base there. It was so secret that the U.S. military did not learn of its existence until several weeks after the end of WWII, whereupon the island immediately became an American installation as unknown as the Japanese one before it.

            At war’s end the Red Army captured a Japanese installation of the same level of high security. This was a plant at Hungnam in what was to soon become communist North Korea. Under the Japanese occupation of Korea, Hungnam was known as Konan. A U.S. Army 24^th Corps document states that for a period of time after the war, the Soviets kept the Hungnam plant in operation; whatever was being produced was collected every other month by Soviet submarines. Later the North Korean communist government took over the plant. In time Hungnam became known as vital to that country’s effort to produce a nuclear weapon.

            An investigator from the U.S. Army’s 24^th Corps interviewed a Japanese officer who claimed that three days before the war ended, Japanese scientists from Hungnam exploded a small atomic device on a nearby island. This officer declared the plant—the heart of Japan’s nuclear weapons program—had earlier been moved from Japan to Korea because of B-29 raids. In the course of this move, three months production time was lost. The officer is quoted as saying, “We would have had (the bomb) three months earlier if it had not been for the B-29.”

            The super-secret Japanese submarine base at Kawazaruna was in no way related to Japan’s atomic bomb program. It was built to pursue a rather more esoteric plan conceived by Uchida Ryohei, founder of the paramilitary, ultra-right-wing Kokuryukai, The Amur River Society, notorious in the West by its more ominous translation, “The Black Dragon Society.” We need not detain ourselves here with the Black Dragons, save to say that besides training espionage agents, assassins and saboteurs, their mission was to forge links with Buddhist organizations across Asia. Indeed, though the Black Dragon Society is remembered today for political intrigue, it maintained formal ties only with Buddhist religious societies. It had no alliance with any political party, Japanese or foreign. Uchida Ryohei’s public image was not that of a strutting militarist-fascist. He wore the robes, long hair and beard of a kenjin, a man of profound and mystical knowledge. As a master of jojutsu, Japanese stick-fighting, he was also man to be feared.    

            In 1980, on a calendar date that became uncertain as soon as the next day dawned, a kabu (Okinawan viper) coiled behind a wastepaper basket—or a Kabu, the Okinawan nickname for the SR-71 “Blackbird” spy aircraft that, had it flown 80,000 feet over Kawazaruna at Mach 3 with laser listening technology pointed at the island—would have heard this conversation within a puzzle-box at the heart of the puzzle-box of Base 89.

            “I’m telling you, however you want to cut this chunk of cheese, this kid will prove to be useful. Don’t, Mr. Sebastian, make too much out of his lack of experience. And Mr. Ferguson, don’t bring up the words ‘young’ and ‘naïve’ again.”

               Earle theatrically dropped a file folder on the table at which they sat. The folder was heavy with documents. It fell with the sound of a fly being swatted. “In Tokyo.” He dropped another. It made the same swatting sound, as did the rest. “In Chiba.” He dropped a third. “In Yokohama.” He dropped a fourth and a fifth. “In Osaka twice.” He dropped a sixth and last. “And in Tokyo again.

               “These books are still open. Gentlemen, with what we’ve got going here [at Base 89] it’s high time we closed them. Unsavory business, need I say that?” He pointed to each file folder in succession as he recited a percentile. “Eighty percent chance, sixty percent, sixty-five, NINETY and NINETY-FIVE, and finally, fifty-five. These are the risks I’ve figured of each book knowing what Kawazaruna was between 1939 and 1945. These two,” he lifted the two Osaka folders and let them drop again, “may know where Kawazaruna is. What you fail to understand, gentlemen, is that I am not proposing we give Mr. Wiederoy all six books to close. Let him see all six, is what I am saying, and pick one that he feels most comfortable with.”        

               Sebastian drummed his fingers impatiently on the tabletop. “Mr. Earle, I can get a Seal team to close these books, expertly and professionally. Your plan just raises too many doubts in my mind.”

               “You seem to forget that a carload of Seals will stand out in these Japanese cities like an 18-centimeter long Amazonian leech squirming on a freshly waxed white tile floor.  We need someone young, who can pass as a backpacker, and who speaks good Japanese. That way, even if he blows it and gets caught by the civvie police, we can plausibly deny the kid was acting under orders. Plausibly deny a Seal team? You know those guys! Give them each a clean 9 mil and they’ll say, ‘What’m I gonna do with this toy?’ Then they’ll run out and grab God knows what ordnance on Navy credit.”

               Ferguson rubbed the back of his aching neck. He’d been in this meeting since 6 AM. “Well, I’m just gonna say that even though I think the kid is a little green, I do not believe that under ordinary circumstances he’d have a moral problem once he was told what these books are up to now. Drugs, prostitution, moral depravity. Everybody in this room knows that the Yakuza was organized after the war by the toughest of the Black Dragons.

               “What I am saying is this—Wiederoy’s a decent chap, and since he took care of Yamato—brilliantly, I might add—his situation is no longer the same. He’s gotten pretty deep into Buddhism. Earle, you can’t just wave away the fact that after Yamato killed himself, Wiederoy had second thoughts.

               “Captain Yamato was a strange one, and that made him a security risk for us. He was a good Naval officer who nursed a serious personal grudge against the military. Or better to say, against certain policies that the U.S. Government executes by means of its armed forces. Despite that, Yamato befriended and trusted Lieutenant Wiederoy. This was a man who after 1975 never trusted any other officer who worked with him! Yamato knew we had him under the magnifying glass.

               “Now don’t get excited when I say this, Earle, but in his own way, Wiederoy’s a bit of a weirdo too. He trusted Yamato in return. On a level beneath the surface, these two men shared the same brand of integrity. Wiederoy wrote in his report that the tape he made was not evidence enough to break his personal trust in his commanding officer. It was because he was ordered to from above that he served notice to Yamato.

               “Earle, I gotta tell you, it’s pretty damned hidebound to refuse to see beyond “for us, this is all that counts—the man did his job.” How many times can we count on ordering a man to act opposite of his inner convictions, his nature, before we have another Captain Yamato on our hands?

               “You tell him to target some old Yakuza pimp—especially Osaka number two, whom we’re pretty sure took out ONI Captain John Converse because he was trying to find out what really happened here at Kawazaruma that caused the crews of two PT boats to vanish the day we found about this place and sent them in to occupy it—yeah, he’d do it. What I don’t get, though, is why focus him on the removal of bad guys? What Yamato talked about on the last day of his life, Wiederoy is internalizing. Buddhism. As far as I know, nonviolence is pretty much essential to the Buddhist way.”

               Earle snapped his fingers. “Yes! Buddhism. Ferguson, in your own ham-fisted manner, you’re starting to get the hang of playing ‘Chopsticks’ along with me. I know  Wiederoy’s not a cold-blooded killer. At the same time, if we ordered him to do it, he’ll take out Osaka Two. You scored a point there, Fergie. I hadn’t thought the Captain Converse angle through. We should see to it that he closes that book because it really plays off Wiederoy’s idealistic streak: settle an old score, an eye for an eye, and all that moralistic tripe. He couldn’t turn it down. The morning after he does the job, though, he’ll probably  look at himself in the bathroom mirror and the same idealism will beat him on the head for turning into a hired killer. ‘Dear Buddha! What’s happening to me? I’m killing old Black Dragons. They were assassins. I’m just becoming an assassin myself.’

               “Wiederoy will end up quitting the service,” Earle continued, “and right there’s the key point in his psychology that differentiates himself from Yamato. All the resentment Yamato had against the government for his dad’s death fed his determination to stay in and get even. He thought he had our hands tied because…”

               Sebastian completed the sentence: “…because he had the gift.”

               Ferguson added: “For thirty years we tried to update the communications technology the Japanese started here: reaching out to our forked-tongue friends down below via electronic transmission (microwaves, UHF, VHF, and ELF); plus experimenting with seawater’s excellent conduction of direct acoustics over long distances, taking that even to the point of amplifying underwater pre-recorded Indian snake charmer music, and the Sciresci musical language. But the return we got was never better than the Japs got, even though we were using technology way beyond that of the 1940s. At least it was tantalizing enough to keep us going. We knew we were stirring something up. VISUAL IMAGERY—LOOK IN OCEAN BOOK. but there was no regular response.”

               Sebastian was not as familiar with the early history of the Kawazaruma project as the other two. “What did the Japanese call their program here? I’m sure they weren’t using the name of the island. Dead giveaway.”

               Ferguson answered. “Keitei, which means ‘seabed.’ That was Uchida Ryohei’s personal idea, by the way. The Black Dragons stumbled into the Kawazaruna mystery during a underwater exercise in 1935. They were testing scuba gear, still experimental then, in development by their German friends. Their operatives just happened to have the exercise out here because of the isolation from the public eye. The scuba divers found the ruins in the shallows off the eastern shore. Some artifacts were shown to Ryohei, who got trusted Imperial Navy officers involved. Plan A was, keep Keitei a complete secret. Plan B was—if circumstances forced a public statement—to cop only to the fact there is an ancient archaeological site offshore that’s being investigated.

               “The Dragons were only peripheral to Keitei once the Imperial Navy set up shop here. It was the Navy that ran the signals and acoustic tests. We knew that the leadership of the Black Dragon Society wanted to get one Dr. Taniguchi involved. He was a psychical researcher who apparently had done some impressive experiments in mind over matter phenomena. Taniguchi promoted Buddhist and other Oriental forms of mentalism as sciences in their own right. So you see, that’s why the Dragons were hooking up with Buddhist groups all across Asia. They were looking for a medium for the Keitei program. Our people were like the Imperial Japanese Navy: they didn’t think Taniguchi’s ideas had any value. That is, until Yamato came along.”

               Earle chuckled, “Well, I still don’t know what to think about that incident Kuzuo Yoshihsa swore he witnessed himself here in 1940.” Sebastian looked puzzled. “It’s a crazy story about a Buddhist nun from Bhutan up in the Himalayas. She supposedly showed up in Japan, got an audience with Yoshihsa, who was Black Dragon number one after Ryohei’s death in ’37. Before he could even open his mouth she told him about Project Keitei and how the Navy was doing everything wrong. Yoshihsa brought her to Kawazaruna by boat. But the Black Dragons’ boat was intercepted by a Japanese Navy patrol boat and warned off. I read the report submitted by the captain of the patrol boat. He described the nun as ‘a shaven-headed woman in purple robes whose face was beautiful except for her eyes, which looked like death.’ She stood at the aft of the boat and made a ghostly shrill cry out upon the waves. Almost immediately a small sea dragon with five heads surfaced and made a similar sound. The woman made the same call again. The small creature—six or seven feet long—came right up to the aft of the boat as a child would when called by its mother. The nun, who had been standing very still while calling the creature, suddenly moved faster than the eye could see, seized the dragon by one of its necks and pulled its body into the boat’s propeller. The sea serpent’s lower half was shredded and the animal was killed instantly. The woman pulled the bloody carcass onto the deck. She flung it down and got to work with a knife, cutting small ruby-like jewels out of each of the dragon’s heads. Yoshihsa and his men just looked on, shocked. Terrified. After collecting the five jewels the woman tossed the mangled body of the serpent overboard. She laughed like a mad fiend, holding up the jewels for all to see. The boat turned back in the northerly direction from which it came.”          

              

  Once he’s out of the service, his disgust with the world of evil—not with us, gentlemen, not with the military, but with the world—will put him on a mystical path. An unorthodox one.”

               “You’re guaranteeing that?”

               “Mr. Sebastian, it’s all in his background file. In the Second World War his father was an OSS operative. His mother was the communications liaison in a Lithuanian resistance group that worked with our side. With America. Her people hated the Russians. Their program was, get the Germans out, don’t let the Russkis back in, and make Lithuania an independent country again. Before hostilities Lithuania was a sovereign Baltic state. In 1940 the Red Army marched in and took over as per a secret protocol between Hitler and Stalin. So our boy’s mother and her group hated both Hitler and Stalin. Espionage being the rat’s nest that it is, it turned out that both the Abwehr and the NKVD had infiltrated her group.

               “On top of that, Roosevelt couldn’t have cared less about Lithuania. It was just another thank-you gift for Uncle Joe. Not even that. As far as Uncle Joe was concerned, Lithuania already belonged to the Soviet Union. The Germans just pick-pocketed it off him. 

               “So, understanding the hand she was being dealt, our boy’s mother—her name was Laima—begged her OSS contact to get her out of there. Our boy’s father-to-be, at great personal risk, managed to do that. Wartime hero. He got her to London where she turned out to be a top intelligence asset. Their professional relationship became a wartime romance. War’s end, she came Stateside with him where they married. In ’55 she gave birth to a son—our boy Charles P.R. Wiederoy. His father died of a heart attack in ‘59. So our boy was basically raised by Laima.

               “Now, the thing you have to understand about Lithuanians is, formally they are Catholics. But scratch one and underneath you’ll find a pagan. Magic. Occultism. Obscurantism. The boy soaked all this up from his Mom. Like Ferguson said, his second middle name is Rathramnus, which he got from her. Laima told him practically every day that his namesake should have been the Pope.”

               “What’s her status now?”

               “She died last year.”

But he won’t leave Japan. We can make sure of that. Yamato understood them but couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk back. And as we all know, he would never let Nagakriti work for us. He had the talent, but he was a damn sight too difficult to deal with. Setting conditions! ‘No more Manzanars, no more plutonium experiments.’ Boo-hoo. Kawazaruna is all about the business end of government.”

               “So the difference here is Wiederoy’s need for a mystery religion.” said Ferguson. “Gnosticism—the world as hell itself, created by a mischievous demiurge, not by God. The need to go from the material to the spiritual by means of a sacrifice that cannot be spoken of in words. That would tend to knock a man’s moral and social compass a little off kilter. And make him very closed-mouthed, I would think. Notice Wiederoy’s second middle name, Rathramnus. He got that from his mother. I looked it up…here, let me read from my notes.

Rathramnus of Corbie in northern France—a Catholic monk who died in A.D. 868. He wrote tracts against heresies. These earned him much praise from his Church authorities. In 1050, however, nearly two hundred years after his death, the Council of Vercelli condemned Rathramnus as a heretic. Because they could not burn him at the stake, they burned his books. They saw in his writings on transubstantiation—the mystical change during the Catholic Mass of the substance, not the form, of bread and wine into Christ’s flesh and blood—they saw possibilities of black magic.    

               Disbelieving laughter rippled through the room. This sound of merriment was punctuated by remarks made by cunning strategists whose minds were now fully in gear.

               “Well, you just gotta admire that level of paranoia. That’s how the Church of Rome hung on to power for so long.”

               “Ahhhh…this is just the kind of stupidity that costs you the faith of the common man. Rathramnus did good for the Church during his life and died in a state of grace. Two centuries later they declared him anathema. What good can come from that?”

               “That’s right. It’s exactly as if our President gave a State of the Union Address on TV to announce to the world that George Washington is now known to have been a British spy.”

               “Correct. Even if you have evidence of something like that, you cover it up.”

               “Cover it up and close the book on anybody who tries to uncover it.”

               “Gentlemen,” Earle spoke up. “Let’s get back on track, please. I’m telling you—no, I’m assuring you—our boy will do what we want him to do. He’ll close at least one book. It will disgust him. But that disgust fits what he expects of the world. Yes, I do predict he’ll opt for early discharge.

               “You said he has two middle names. Rathramnus is the second. What’s the first?

               “Perseus. That came from his father.”

               “Perseus is good.  Nice military ring to it.”

               “Pay attention, gentlemen. Our young Lieutenant’s been over here just a few years now, but in that time he learned Japanese. In his spare time he’s been doing personal research into Buddhism. Reading books. Japanese as well as English books. He’s paid visits to several monasteries. On the advice of one of his colleagues, who is in touch with a man who is in touch with a man who is in touch with me, one of those monasteries is the Zentsugi. This is his way of dealing with the recent loss of his mother. He’s shopping around for an unorthodox belief of his own.

               “To draw a picture for you, gentlemen, we will assign him one case to begin with. He will do the needful. We’ll give him another, and another, until the performance of his duty sickens his soul. After that we know what he will do. He’ll seek spiritual quietude the Buddhist way by entering a monastery. It’s all going to happen right here in Japan, where we have the means to nudge him and to make sure the doors we want to open for him open. Don’t think that his spiritual interests will just be a waste of time. I believe they will prove to be very useful. He is just the type of guy who’ll learn some very interesting, esoteric skills. Anything that can be put to military use, we’ll be sure to extract.”

               “Hmmm,” Sebastian purred, “Cutting edge psywar techniques ‘R’ US. Remember Dr. Jose Delgado? The man’s a genius in brain technology. Back in the ‘50’s the ONI was the first intel group to see his value and fund him. When the CIA wanted in on the action, we said, ‘Sure, if you guys pay him through us.’ That way we stayed on top of whatever projects the Agency hired him to work on. Delgado single-handedly invented brain implants.”

               “Yeah, that was great back in the fifties, Sebastian. But you know there’s a big loophole in implant tech. Metal in the head shows up under X-rays. It sets off metal detectors. And so now, the public’s getting hip to it. We need to look into pure psychic phenomena. Telekinesis, teleportation, mind reading…”

               “Yeah, I am in perfect agreement. We should move on this fast. Through a back channel I’ve gotten word that since ‘77 the Army’s had this Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel investigating the whole New Age scene. Jim Channon, that’s his name. Channon’s very much into Buddhist techniques of mental concentration. He’s got some wild plan for a First Earth Battalion.”

               “Need I remind you, Sebastian, landlubbers will never get it right. Since before the war, the real action has been right here at Kawazaruna. Lucky we’re on top of it now instead of the Japs. Though we have to keep the ones we can trust in the game. The future of warfare, the future of everything, is at the bottom of the ocean. We’ve known it for a quarter of a century. UFOs? The Air Force can’t catch them because they think flight is all about Newtonian mechanics. The Army’s First Earth Battalion? Let’em wear flowers in their hair. Even the Russkis, God bless ‘em, with all their research into psi powers, haven’t got a clue of what we’re sitting on right here. This will make the H-Bomb look like a firecracker.” 

               “So this is what’s on for Rathramnus? Inner space exploration?”

               “Mister, I think you’ve just coined the name for this operation. Project Rathramnus. Sound good?” (Agreement all around.)

               “I’m pretty confident Project Rathramnus will turn out to be a plan for life. This guy is a searcher. He’ll step out of the world for a while, then step back in once he thinks he has the secret means of transformation. All we have to do is two things—one: make sure he meets a man who can teach him the secret we need him to learn, and two: wait for him. And we will. Right here in Japan. Or anywhere he goes.”

            Charles never knew that such a conversation about him took place. Within the next year his superiors gave him several dangerous covert assignments. Of these, only one was a mission to “close a book.” It left him devastated. He retired from the Navy in 1982. The same year he entered a Buddhist monastery and stayed for the minimum trial period of three years. He was introduced to a number of “skillful means” that could not be explained by Occidental science. While visiting Nepal in 1987, he received initiation into a Vedanta-yoga sampradaya (disciplic tradition). After his move to the States his wife, and the children they would have later, would take initiation in a Vedanta tradition of a similar philosophical outlook as his, one that had taken root in the U.S. in the mid-sixties.

            In 1997 he and Yayoi followed a strange news report out of Japan. It was about the Pokemon cartoon panic. More than 700 children were hospitalized because of the effects of a scene twenty minutes into the TV cartoon that touched off what was reported to be “photosensitive epilepsy.” Children went into convulsions. One even stopped breathing. The report hypothesized that behind the Pokemon incident was a test of a “neurosemiological communications system” called HENSHU.     

            If Charles had been keeping more attentive track of his blissful time in San Diego, he would have noticed that three days after the Pokemon report, his old friend Roy Earle contacted him. He and a few others he’d gotten to know in the ONI had climbed the career ladder into the Pentagon. He was surprised to hear how much they knew about what he’d been doing since he left the Navy. Obviously he was being tracked. It was strange but not alarming, for his friends seemed very proud of him. They told him his presence was greatly desired in Washington D.C. They promised him all that was wanted of him was what he had been doing in San Diego: teaching. It sounded exciting. At first Yayoi was reluctant to leave California, but at last she relented.

            After thirteen years, he was back with the ONI. Not as a military operative but as a civilian teacher. He persuaded himself that he was home again, right where he belonged. What really made his new job seem important were his students. They were being groomed for high security positions in defense intelligence. These young men and women were America’s best and brightest.

            In Washington Wiederoy’s wife also attained a new level of happiness. She gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She nicknamed them her momo (“peaches”), using the Japanese gender form momotaroo for the boy, Mohana, and momoko for his sister, Mohini.

            It did not take long for a faint scent of the same disgusting odor that had driven Wiederoy out of the Navy in ’82 to wrinkle his nostrils in Washington. His old buddy Roy Earle let slip in a conversation that while Charles might have quit the ONI, the ONI never let go of him. On another day he absent-mindedly picked up a file left in a place where he was sure to notice it. Giving it a cursory glance, Wiederoy was stunned to discover a fact sheet inside that reported Yukio Nakano’s Kairyu Dantai had worked hand in glove with an unnamed faction within the Japanese and United States intelligence community since the mid-sixties. He made discreet inquiries about this faction to persons he thought he could trust. What he got back were whispers about secret societies.

            In late 1998, he found laid across his desk three papers marked “classified.” They seemed to be summaries of experiments in unconventional uses of electronic communications media. One was an enigmatic document on some outfit called T.I.A.M.A.T.—“The Internet As a Magickal-Aethyric Tool”—that mixed the Internet and hypnosis for occult purposes. Another was about Nicola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe project, which failed in 1905 because of his sponsors’ reluctance to see it through. Whoever wrote this report was convinced that there was no reason why Tesla’s idea would not have worked. Not only would have radio messages have been wirelessly transmitted  between huge towers built in Long Island and London, but also a tremendous amount of useable current would been exchanged. The author of the piece anticipated that if the public were openly exposed to a steady burst of hundreds or thousands of watts of power, “weird” biological and/or psychological side-effects were very likely over time.

            The third report Wiederoy found to be at the same time the strangest and the most familiar. That was because it was about Japan. Reading it transported him back in time to when he was a Lietenant j.g. field agent.

            It briefly described a Japanese society he had never heard of, Seicho No-ie, Truth of Life, founded by Dr. Masaharu Taniguchi in the 1930s. This name rang no bell. “Dr. Taniguchi,” the report read, “scientifically developed ways to put to technical use the seven axioms of The Kybalion, a book on hermetic knowledge published in the United States in 1908 that still enjoys a degree of popularity in occult circles.”

            The Kybalion’s axioms are 1) all is mind; 2) mind is transmutable by polarization; 3) the reality, or The All, is perceived by us to be the physical, mental and spiritual planes, but there is never contradiction between them; 4) the three planes of The All are three general levels of vibration that are dividable into millions of millions of planes; 5) the physical, mental and spiritual planes exist because the vibrations that flow between the poles of transmutation are rhythmic, 6) this exchange of rhythm is related as cause and effect, hence the theory of random chance is wrong; 7) all the poles co-vibrating in rhythm may be understood as male and female principles that constantly procreate at every level: gross, subtle, and transcendental.

            The report cited a 1934 radio interview in which Dr. Taniguchi said, “We in Japan are at a cultural advantage over other nations in bringing forth the science of The Kybalion. The fundamental concept is no different from the creative interplay of Yin and Yang. In yoga we find the same concept of a power exchange between prakrti, the female principle, and purusa, the male principle. In mikkyo (esoteric) Buddhism, monks perform ceremonies in which the vajra (thunderbolt, or diamond) represents the cosmic male principle and the bell represents the cosmic female principle.

            “The Kybalion takes this twin-pole model of vibratory exchange that sustains the universe at all levels, mental as well as matieral—a model very familiar to the Asian mind—and elaborates on it in a way that catches the scientific imagination. I see possibilities of advanced kigooroni, of communication not by language but by oto nashi no ohna, inaudible signals that directly stimulate the brain and nervous system. Perhaps we can systematically develop telepathy and communication with non-human life forms.

            “I have designed some machinery that could be developed into devices with multiple applications. If we in Japan can make such devices work we shall lift science out of the pessimistic ditch it’s been driven into by Western materialism. Western physicists have promoted the nightmare of entropy. The concept is so alien to our way of thinking we don’t even have a Japanese word for it, therefore our children are taught this foreign-based word in school, entoropi. It means that in the natural world things will inevitably run down, deteriorate. The universe will one day just run out of power and stop. But there is an opposite concept, ectropy. It is the universe’s nature to renew itself, to develop matter and energy, form and diversity.’    

            The report ended with this short paragraph: “In 1935, Dr. Taniguchi’s Truth of Life message of a caught the attention of Uchida Ryohei and his successor, Kuzuo Yoshihsa, of the Kokuryukai, the Black Dragon Society. Ryohei had several meetings with Taniguchi. Although Ryohei died in 1937, he had by that time already passed on a plan to Yoshihsa…” The last three lines of the document were blacked out.

            Despite minor bouts of depression that usually accompanied these stray bits of intrigue, Charles stayed on at the Pentagon. Sometimes he ran into Roy Earle. He expected that sooner or later an attempt would be made to rope him into the darker side hinted at by these documents. But as time passed, whenever he saw Roy he seemed increasing distant, preoccupied…even worried.

            On September 11, 2001, it all changed. He was in a different wing of the building, but the rocking of the floor beneath his feet almost threw him down. The sound of the explosion deafened him for several minutes. He never saw Roy, Alec Sebastian, John Ferguson or the others again. In the months that followed new people, young people, flooded the Pentagon. It was a different place. In the midst of strangers he was able to see more, and the more he saw, the more didn’t like. In 2002 he quit for good. And this time the ONI seemed happy to let go of him once and for all.

           

            All the while he and Bjoern stayed in touch. Every two, three years they’d meet up somewhere. It was when he passed seventy that Ingvaldssen started saying, “I’m just living out my life from day to day.” Kauai is an earthly paradise; Bjoern had a beauty of a sailboat, and money to burn. But he ended up just watching the days pass, thinking harder and harder about his past.

            One evening, during a visit Wiederoy made to Kauai, Bjoern took him out on his boat to the Na Pali coast. Near the Tunnel of Terror sea cave, he dropped anchor and played a searchlight over the jagged double opening to the underworld. “There’s a waterfall inside the cave,” said Bjoern. “If I had a Zodiac boat, we could zip in there through the hole on the right. We’d pass right under the waterfall. Get ourselves soaking wet. Hook a ninety-degree turn, zip right out again through the hole on the left. Easy.”  

            Ingvaldssen paused. When he spoke again, his voice was hesitant and heavy with the strain of fear. “You know what, Charlie? I don’t think it’s going to be as easy to zip round a corner in hell and find an exit door back to this world.”   

            That night, as the boat rose and fell with the waves that ceaselessly made their way into the dual maw of volcanic rock, Wiederoy met a man he didn’t know at all—a man made more of secrets than he was of flesh. Like the soul, his secrets would live on after the body named Bjoern Ingvaldssen was gone. Some of his secrets were deadly.

            Last spring they found his boat anchored halfway between Kauai and Niihau Island. His body floated to the surface a few days later. Suicide wouldn’t have surprised Wiederoy. He didn’t believe it was murder. Or perhaps the more honest thing to say was, he hoped it wasn’t murder. But you never could be sure. The only thing that was sure was, Bjoern’s secrets were now his secrets…secrets that even Roy Earle didn’t know.

             In the late October morning sun, Wiederoy blinked back the tears as the black Andruss cruised by, leaving the street open for him to cross. “A good life,” he said aloud. He sprinted across the road, but in the middle a wave of grief almost folded his knees. Steadying himself, he reached the other side. The border-grove of the Ogham-Rune trees that followed the whole length of the road now loomed around him. He could hardly see the nine rows of trees for the flooding of his eyes. “A good life,” he said again in a croaking whisper. “What the hell does that mean?”

            “Nine is the devil his own self.”

            He looked around wildly. “Who’s there? Who’s there!” He was sobbing openly now, and felt like a searing gullet of pain was swallowing him whole. “Captain Yamato? Sir? Is that…is that you?” But there were only the trees.