But in the end, it was the red fox-not the fast freight- that solved the mystery of what was in Philip's heart and changed his life forever.

During a long, particularly bitter winter, when Philip was nearing his fourteenth birthday, a red fox began to find its way into the hen house. It was Philip himself who first found the evidence: blood smears, caked feathers, pieces of the hens' carca.s.ses.For weeks, Philip and his father tracked the fox across snow-blanketed fields, whispering woods, into a rock-strewn stream bed silvery with ice. Philip, armed with an old but serviceable .22-caliber Remington rifle, watched as his father stopped periodically in their hunt to show him the red fox's spoor: footprints here where the animal's weight broke through the snow's icy crust, here where it brushed against the bole of a tree and left reddish hairs, there where it left its droppings.

As the hunt progressed Philip found himself coming more and more alive, aware.

His mind, quick to pick up the tricks his father taught him, began its own questing. So that by the third or fourth time they set out after the fox, it was Philip who led the way, Philip who spotted the animal's spoor.

And in the end, it was Philip who discovered why their trail always petered out in the stream bed. The red fox was more careful here. They had been constantly frustrated and mystified as to why they lost all sign of him in this area.

His father had told him that foxes generally slept in tall gra.s.s, their bushy tails curled around them for warmth. But some elemental instinct drew Philip to the banks of the frozen stream, where badgers, moles and similar creatures made their burrows. Sure enough, the fox had gone to ground in one of these recently abandoned holes.

The elation that filled Philip at the moment of discovery was like a white-hot fire.

He remembered bis father's voice in his ear: "He's yours, son."

He remembered pulling up the Remington, sighting down its barrel.

Most of all he remembered that moment-as if it could be frozen in time precisely, like the pristine stream bed-when the fox was slammed backward against the burrow wall, the red clay smearing its red and silver back.

The fox was the raider: the killer, the invader, the destroyer. It was the Saracen among the Christians. Philip discovered a deep satisfaction in tracking it down and expunging it from the face of the earth. It was as if he had righted an essential wrong.

Philip sold the farm the day after he buried his father in the earth. The next day he stole a ride on the fast freight. He left western Pennsylvania far behind, but the red fox filled his mind. The memory of tracking that fox, of the moment he had caught up with it, pushed him onward through the streets of one town after another. He was caught up in a restlessness, in a need to feel again the straightening of the cosmic scales. Nothing else could satisfy the anarchic emptiness inside him. He went from towns to cities. And the larger the population, the more he saw the scales of justice as lopsided. In Chicago, he tried his hand at police work for a time. But his maverick personality continually ran him afoul of the political machine entrenched there.

He swung aboard another train, came east to New York. But it was 1940 now, and the war was on. This interested Philip in the most elemental way. Here was the greatest of wrongs that needed righting.

He enlisted in the army. During basic training, his unconventional nature got him into trouble. But lucidly for him, he had a drill sergeant with a keen eye, who signed Philip up for special training: for intelligence work in the OSS. The DI's a.s.sessment of his charge was correct. Philip proved himself to be one of those special people for whom the armed services are always on the lookout. He never considered his own safety, never contemplated his own death.

Rather, it was as if he was surrounded by an invisible aura that not only protected him from harm but kept those around him safe as well.

His superiors at OSS training took full advantage of this quality, putting Philip through the most rigorous and grueling of physical and mental training.

He not only accepted what they threw at him, he welcomed the challenges.

And when they put him into the field, they hooked him up with someone they considered "compatible." By this, they meant someone who could get close to Philip, someone who had the "correct" background. Someone, in short, who could tame his maverick spirit.

Philip and a lieutenant named Jonas Sammartin followed the twin p.r.o.ngs of theAllied advance toward the Pacific Rim. They never saw action in the conventional sense. Rather, they used Jonas's forte-decoding ciphers-to intercept j.a.panese military communications. Using the information, Philip would lead a team of hand-picked men on nighttime forays into enemy camps, to inflict the maximum amount of damage without leaving any trace of who had been responsible.

In 1943, they were at work in the Solomon Islands. Less than a year later, it was New Guinea. Then, with increasing rapidity, the Marianas, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, heading inexorably for the j.a.panese islands.

So effective were their raids throughout the Pacific that the j.a.panese high command coined a phrase for them: ninja senso. Ninja warfare. While their exploits naturally never made it into the Stars and Stripes, the ninja senso had gained something of a reputation in the whispered scuttleb.u.t.t among the American troops.

In the last six months of the war, in that time after the fire bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, in which fully half the city was incinerated-and before the world changed forever in August of that year, when the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima-Philip and Jonas found time to become more than combat buddies who had to rely on one another for their lives. They became friends.

Jonas was the last in a long and ill.u.s.trious line of military men. His grandfather had been a New York City police captain in 1896, when Teddy Roosevelt had served as head of the city's police board. A year later, the two of them resigned. With mutual friend Leonard Wood, they formed the famed Rough Riders. Jonas's father had been a major in the cavalry during World War I. He had died in France, after having been decorated four times in the field.

Jonas was already living up to his family's reputation. He graduated first in his cla.s.s from West Point. A strong-willed, by-the-book young man, he distinguished himself at the OSS, astonishing his mentors with his uncanny ability to solve seemingly impossible strategic puzzles. They put him to work in cryptography.

"There's so much death here," Jonas said late one night as they finished off a fifth of Russian vodka, "it's become unreal." They were on a destroyer, heading for Mindanao. The commander, flattered to be ferrying such famous men, had broken out his best liquor for them.

"Life is unreal," Philip said. "That must mean there's no longer a difference between life and death." He remembered the three of them laughing their heads off over that.

"I don't know what life is anymore," the commander said, refilling their gla.s.ses. "Jesus, one month is like a day out here. One part of the Pacific's like another, one island full of j.a.ps looks like any other island. All I gotta do is make sure my guns. .h.i.t what I aim at and be sure I keep my men as safe as I can."

Philip waved his arm, gesturing. "There's more than that out past the horizon.

Gotta be."

"Maybe. But isn't that what war is all about?" the commander said. "Death and the compression of time?"

"No," Philip said, unaccountably angrily. "War is about winning." That morning, the radiation ate Hiroshima alive.

Philip was in the business of death. He did it so well, he would come to understand years later, that he would have no reason ever to do anything else.

He was not unlike the poor wretches who had survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki, watching their bodies being corroded by an invisible and incomprehensible force that had taken hold of their lives and would not let go.

Another form of radiation was affecting Philip. He had allowed his work to become his life. And in so doing, his work had become both strict definition and ultimate boundary. In that sense, was it so far removed from the chicken farm in western Pennsylvania that had enslaved his father?

When he and Jonas arrived in Tokyo in November 1946, the city was blanketed with an early snow. They hadn't seen snow for a very long time; they had evenforgotten what winter was. The black kimonos stood out starkly against the virgin-white. It was only gradually, as the city dug out from under, when the snow turned ash-gray, that other colors began to be seen: the bright red of a kite, the deep blue of a porcelain cup, the intense green of a cryptomeria tree. Yet they were no more vibrant or memorable than that first startling contrast that had been their first sight of Tokyo that chilly November morning.

In j.a.pan, Philip and Jonas were under the control of a colonel named Harold Morten Silvers. The previous October, President Truman had fired William Donovan, disbanding his brainchild, the OSS. In its place, the president-with the urging of close advisers such as General Sam Hadley-had created an ill-defined, temporary network, the CIG, the Central Intelligence Group. The CIG was, of course, composed of the dogs who had been leashed to the OSS.

Silvers was one of the most important of those. He a.s.signed to Philip and Jonas a young CIG aide named Ed Porter, who had come here with the first contingent of the occupation army. Porter was a fresh-faced, regulation-type kid who gave them an extensive tour of the vast, half-burned city.

Late in the afternoon, they arrived in the Asakusa district, north of Tokyo's center. A pale and bloated sun shimmered on the sinuous Sumida River. The place was odd. Tokyo was usually thronged with people, vehicles and energy that even the immediate aftermath of war could not affect. But around here there was nothing: no pedestrians, no traffic, no life.

"This is what's left of the great Asakusa temple," Porter said, pointing to the charred remains of what was now nothing more than a hole in the ground. He walked them through it while he talked in the practiced, dispa.s.sionate tone of the professional guide. "This was where thousands of j.a.panese fled during the fire bombing of Tokyo last March. Three hundred Superfortress bombers dropped over seven hundred thousand M29's, Ever hear of them, you two? Not in your line of work, I expect. M29's are an experimental type of bomb that contain a mixture of incendiary jelly and oil.* Explosions and raging fires ensued."

Porter pointed to the remnants of what appeared to be a couple of blackened pillars. "The temple was built in the seventeenth century. Ever since then, it had survived every natural disaster, including violent earthquakes and the great fire of 1923. The M29's took care of that.

"In all, almost two hundred thousand j.a.panese died in the fire bombing. That's maybe sixty, seventy thousand more than we estimate died-and will die-as a result of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima."

The j.a.panese people buried their dead. But they had been given a task: to forget the misery of the war, to turn their faces away from the mistakes of the past and begin a new life. To build a future upon the ashes of the old.

General Douglas MacArthur had also been given a task, that of "redirecting"

the new j.a.pan. This concept came straight from an Eyes Only memo from President Truman's desk. It meant not only helping to put j.a.pan's economy back on its feet, but also making sure those feet stayed on the straight and narrow-American-style. This was officially known as the democratization of j.a.pan. It included a new const.i.tution, decentralization of the highly centralized j.a.panese government, an end to militarism, dissolving the huge zaibatsu-the family-owned industrial conglomerates that wielded so much power in prewar j.a.pan-as well as an immediate purge of war criminals and all known and suspected left-wing elements from both the public and the private sectors.

The Tojo-controlled Diet, the j.a.panese parliament, was "liberated" of its militaristic members. Every day, Philip and (* The first experimental use of napalm.) Jonas expected to hear of the beginning of rumored purges throughout the zaibatsu hierarchy. But nothing happened.

Until one morning they were summoned to Colonel Sil-vers's office. As usual, they were greeted by David Turner, Silvers's administrative adjutant. Turner was a man approximately their age. He was tall, slender, bespectacled, with a handsome, ascetic face. Women apparently found him charismatic, for Philip had often seen him out with a variety of unattached WACs or female CIGadministrative personnel. Unlike other single CIG men, he preferred American women to the staggering array of j.a.panese girls available in Tokyo's booming nighttime clubs.

They exchanged greetings with Turner, but from their side they were more than cool, since Philip and Jonas possessed the field man's inbred contempt for office-bound paper pushers, who lacked the courage to test their mettle in the arena of battle.

Turner led them into Silvers's inner sanctum, then he closed the door behind him, leaving the three men alone. They sat on the hard-backed wooden chairs in front of Silvers's desk, and he handed them coded files. During the war, the OSS had been a shadow organization. That was one of the main reasons it had been so successful. Now, in peacetime, there was an urgent necessity to lengthen and deepen those shadows.

"The zaibatsu" Silvers said, "still wield an enormous amount of power. That's not surprising since they are the traditional business conglomerates owned and operated by j.a.pan's most influential families.

"According to my intelligence, the j.a.panese spent a lot of time rewriting log books, accounts, drafts and memos. While we were busy putting together the nuts and bolts of the occupation, their bureaucracy was in the process of getting rid of the incriminating evidence against their most important militarists.

"Of course, we have no proof of this. But the upshot is they did such a good job of it that the war-crimes tribunal can't touch a number of the worst industrialists who were directing the manufacturing of munitions and spurring on the war effort.

"Therefore, it is often . . . difficult if not downright un-politic for the war-crimes tribunal to go after certain, ah, high-ranking zaibatsu members. As you will see from the files, there are a specific number of influential people from this sector of j.a.panese society who must be eliminated. We cannot-and neither can the j.a.panese-tolerate the existence of war criminals in this new society the president has committed us to building in j.a.pan, not even those whom the war-crimes tribunal cannot touch."

Silvers brought out a pipe and leather pouch. "Sometimes the democratic process needs a bit of, er, unconventional a.s.sistance." He unzipped the pouch.

"These individuals cannot be disposed of in the accepted, public procedural manner. That is to say the war-crimes tribunal is powerless to touch them."

He stuffed the pipe with tobacco from the pouch, got it going. "That's where you two come in. You will terminate each target detailed in those files and make each operation seem like an accident."

Philip considered this. "Can I ask why the war-crimes tribunal can't get at these men? If they are war criminals, they deserve to be brought to justice."

"You can ask," Silvers said, staring at the ceiling.

"Let's be creative," Jonas said. "Let's imagine the most ba.n.a.l of reasons. In this kind of bureaucracy, that would make sense. The men in these files still have too much influence within the government. Or they've got dirt on us we don't want aired."

Philip leafed through the files. "Arisawa Yamamoto, Shigeo Nakajima, Zen G.o.do." He looked up. "What I'd like to know," he said, "is how these targets were identified-if, as you said, elements within the j.a.panese bureaucracy did such an expert job of destroying the evidence of the war crimes these men committed."

Colonel Silvers puffed on his pipe. He seemed inordinately fascinated by the spider-web network of cracks in the ceiling.

"Just execute the directive," he said- in a hard voice. "In the manner outlined."

Philip had the CIG to thank for his marriage. He met Lillian Hadley in Tokyo.

It happened on a late December day in 1946. He and Jonas had been in j.a.pan for just over a month. It had rained all afternoon. The evening washed itself clean like a cat. The USO troupe was putting on a Christmas show for the American forces occupying the city. By show time, the skies had cleared andthe crowd was dense.

Philip got his first glimpse of Lillian Hadley that evening: spotlit, chrome microphone in one hand, backed by a sixteen-piece band. It is difficult to convey the profound effect Lillian had on him. Though she had a vibrant voice, it was nevertheless unremarkable, which was in stark contrast to her aura. Her great gift was in playing to the crowd. She obviously adored being the center of attention of twenty thousand soldiers. It showed in the way she sang to them, in the way she bent down, holding first this soldier's hand, then touching that soldier's cheek. She was wholly American, the epitome of the girl next door who appeared on magazine covers. In short, she reminded them of home, and they loved her.

So did Philip. Seeing her up there, he was reminded of where he was and just how long he had been away, not only from home-his house, his town, his country-but from anything that had a semblance of normalcy. Seeing her, he was swept away by the powerful nostalgia that causes the expatriot periodically to weep into his whiskey and get into fights for no good reason.

When the concert was over, Philip found himself heading backstage. His CIG credentials were more than sufficient to get him through the phalanx of guards.

Once backstage, amid the scurrying people in greasepaint and costumes, trunks and batteries of lights, snaking cables and instrument cases, he did not quite know what to do, until he saw Lillian.

She was standing by herself, a quiet, almost regal figure, drinking coffee from a paper cup, thoughtfully absorbing the controlled chaos around her. She reminded him of a homecoming queen at college, that un.o.btainable personage with the perfect face and body, smiling sweetly while all the h.o.r.n.y men mentally undressed her. He had seen such a scene in the movies. Philip, of course, had never gone to college. The farm had seen to that. But that had not stopped him from educating himself. He had always been a voracious reader, for reading, like daydreaming, possessed that wonderfully unique quality of allowing oneself to escape into a whole new world.

Without being totally conscious of what he was doing, Philip went up to Lillian and introduced himself.

She laughed at his jokes, was pleased at his compliments, spoke at first shyly, then more openly. After a time, Philip realized how lonely and cut off from all she loved she was. She was the kind of girl you had always longed to take to the local hangout after a Sat.u.r.day night movie, so all your friends could moon over what was yours.

Time would show that Lillian Hadley would age well and- perhaps even more important-gracefully. But in those days she was absolutely stunning. Her father was Sam Hadley, a three-star general on MacArthur's personal staff, who had a well-known reputation as a strict disciplinarian from the old George Patton school. Hadley was a brilliant career officer, capable of making instant decisions under the most harrowing of circ.u.mstances. He was the same General Hadley who had pushed for the creation of the CIG. He was one of the creators of America's top-level strategy in j.a.pan. It was even said by some that the president relied on General Hadley more than on anyone else to formulate long-range policy in the Far East.

They spent the evening together, talking and staring into each other's eyes.

Often he saw in her face everything that he had loved-and had fled from-in the rolling hills of west-em Pennsylvania. It was as if he could define her features by his tiny hometown soda shop that slaked his thirst on dusty summer afternoons, the red-sided wooden school in which he had learned to read and write, the sweet pealing of the bells of the church where on Sunday mornings he and his father went to pray and give thanks. For him, this ail-American girl embodied all that was wonderful in his childhood-without any of the dark baggage that had caused him to run away. So perhaps it was not surprising that he should confuse this intense nostalgia with love.

"Sometimes," she said, "I miss my brothers so much I feel as if I can'tbreathe."

"Are they far away from here?" Philip asked.

Lillian staring up at the stars, their own private playground. Weeping silently.

"What happened?" he asked gently.

For a time, Philip thought she hadn't heard him. "My brothers," she said so softly that the wind took her words past his ear, "were both killed in the war. Jason was at Anzio, on the beach. I don't think he ever felt solid European ground beneath his feet.

"Billy was a tank commander. In Patton's division, no less. Father was so proud of him. Billy was all he could talk about for months and months. Well, Patton was a headline-maker, after all. And where Patton went, Billy did too.

"He made it all the way to Pilsen. Then a German land mine ripped open his tank and his belly."

She was shivering a little, and Philip put his arms around her.

"I still hate this war, even though it's over," she said. "It was cruel and inhuman. Human beings were not meant to bear such pain."

No, Philip thought sadly, on the contrary. Human beings gladly wage war, time after time, learning nothing from history, because they crave power above all else. And power, by definition, means the enslavement of others.

"They were so young," Lillian said. "So pure and brave."

Philip had never met a woman who so filled up his eyes and his heart. He couldn't think around her. He didn't want to. He wanted to hold her, touch her, kiss her. He felt drenched in her beauty.

It wasn't until much later that he found out how much she despised j.a.pan and the j.a.panese. But by then it was too late.

In the autumn of 1946, the American government subsidies to j.a.pan had finally ceased. Because, to an inordinate degree, they had been propping up the shaky postwar economy, it immediately began to crumble.

There was an air of panic among the top ministers, who foresaw that by March 1947, the j.a.panese economy would grind to a complete halt. The subsidies had come to an end at a time when j.a.panese stockpiles were virtually nil, when imports were almost nonexistent, when the country was facing an appalling coal shortage. In short, j.a.pan would be producing nothing because there would be no raw materials from which to manufacture products.

Two weeks before the occupation forces would celebrate Thanksgiving, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida had hand-picked a brain trust of top ministers to devise a way out of the crisis.

Of the six men making up the Coal Committee, all but one was either from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry- from its inception in 1925, the most powerful and influential of all the ministries in the j.a.panese bureaucracy-or the Foreign Ministry, with a degree in economics. The exception was a man by the name of Zen G.o.do. He was a newly appointed vice-chairman of the Bank of Nippon and was by far the youngest of the s.e.xtet.

Nevertheless, it was G.o.do who formulated the idea, adopted and endorsed by the committee, of prioritizing sectors of the economy to promote specific "high-speed" production. Without this great leap forward, he reasoned, there would very soon be no new j.a.pan left to support its people.

G.o.do had the best education imaginable. He had graduated first in his cla.s.s from Todai-Tokyo University, the most prestigious seat of learning in j.a.pan.

He had joined the home ministry in 1939 along with fifty-six other newly graduated lawyers. That, however, is where then- bureaucratic careers diverged from the other thousand or so newcomers to the various ministries.

G.o.do and the select others were given very special training. By 1941, all were in place throughout the country. G.o.do's place was with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board.

Eventually, according to the files Silvers had provided Philip and Jonas, G.o.do became the chief of the city's Tokko-the thought-control police. Tokko was established to ferret out any and all anti-militaristic elements within the country who might sabotage or in some way undermine the strenuous war effort.Mostly this meant Communists and Communist sympathizers.

Because of the nature of their job, Tokko officials were accorded almost unlimited privileges. Around the country they could virtually do as they pleased. Their superiors were that only for the record. A Tokko official could not be fired or even disciplined by his superior. In fact, because the Tokko man was appointed from Tokyo, his superior was duty-bound to follow his instructions.

The best of the e-Tokko men-such as Zen G.o.do-used their inside contacts to prepare themselves for the surrender of j.a.pan. Thus, unlike many others, they flourished after the war. As vice-chairman of one of only three central banks, Zen G.o.do wielded almost unlimited power in the j.a.pan of 1946. It was he who helped formulate the new economic setup: Guided by government policy, the central banks over-loaned to specific companies to get them started up. These companies became so dependent on the banks that they were eventually engulfed by them. Soon these central banks would become the nuclei of the successors to the zaibatsu, the traditional family-run conglomerates. They themselves would run multibusiness konzerns, all within the most profitable sectors of the nascent, ready-to-boom postwar economy.

Zen G.o.do was also one of the foremost pract.i.tioners of kanryodo, the art of being a bureaucrat. Kanryodo was no less difficult to master than aikido, the art of hand-to-hand combat, or kendo, the art of sword fighting.

Only the j.a.panese could have the mind-set to elevate such a pedestrian pursuit to the level of an art. And consequently, it was the bureaucrat who was to the new j.a.pan what the samurai was to the old j.a.pan. Ironically, the rise of the bureaucrat was the American occupation's doing. By dismantling the military and severely crippling the zaibatsu, General MacArthur had left a power vacuum of such magnitude that it could not exist for long.

As the sector of the nation designated to rebuild j.a.pan, the bureaucracy naturally moved into this vacuum, taking advantage of every opportunity with which it was presented.