THE LAST KAMIKAZE

A dying old Japanese warrior seeks revenge on the US--and an admiring young Japanese-American seeks to stop him--in a contemporary thriller from the author of Sword of the Shaheen, The Iceman, and The Alpha Bug. Retired Japanese Defense Force officer Saburo Genda has neither forgiven nor forgotten. The Americans who vaporized his parents with their atomic bomb, whose soldiers raped his pregnant wife, have turned his country into a rich but soulless nation. Genda, who would have died on a kamikaze mission but for the timely end of hostilities, intends to see that the Americans are punished before his inevitable death from leukemia. Helped by a sympathetic Soviet agent, Genda teams up with a cell of Japanese Red Army terrorists and begins a last private war on his conquerors at the very moment that the US and Japan are about to consummate an agreement restoring Japan's role as a major military power. That agreement is to be signed by the Prime Minister and the President at the U.S.S. Arizona memorial on the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Genda's preliminary skirmishes lead the American State Department to send George Sakai, a nisei antiterrorist specialist, to head off trouble. Sakai tracks down Genda, but he's unable to prevent the stern old warrior's rendezvous with one of the last functional Mitsubishi Zeros. Banzai. Better-than-average thriller, thanks to the tricky cultural currents between the two honorable and worthy opponents.