The Washington Navy Yard slept like an ancient city guarded
by thick walls and a river. Old men stood watch, plodding
between electric time detectors to register their rounds
of factories, magazines, shops, and barracks. Outside the
perimeter rose a hill of darkened workers’ houses. The Capitol
Dome and the Washington Monument crowned it,
glittering under a full moon like polar ice. A whistle moaned.
A train approached, bleeding steam and clanging its bell.
U.S. Marine sentries opened the North Railroad Gate.
No one saw Yamamoto Kenta hiding under the Baltimore
and Ohio flatcar that the locomotive pushed into
the yard. The flatcar’s wheels groaned under a load of
fourteen-inch armor plate from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Brakemen uncoupled the car on a siding, and the engine
backed away.
Yamamoto eased to the wooden crossties and stone
ballast between the rails. He lay still until he was sure he
was alone. Then he followed the tracks into the cluster of
three-story brick-and-iron buildings that housed the Gun
Factory.
Moonlight lancing down from high windows, and the
ruby glow of banked furnaces illuminated an enormous
cavern. Traveler cranes hulked in shadows overhead.
Colossal fifty-ton dreadnought battleship guns crowded
the fl oor as if a fiery hurricane had leveled a steel forest.
Yamamoto, a middle-aged Japanese with threads of
gray in his shiny black hair and a confident, dignified manner,
wove a purposeful route through the watchmen’s
prescribed paths, examining gun lathes, machines for
rifl ing, and furnaces. He paid special attention to deep
wells in the fl oor, the brick-lined shrinking pits where the
guns were assembled by squeezing steel jackets around
fi fty-foot tubes. His eye was sharp, refined by similar clandestine
‘tours’ of Vickers and Krupp – the British and
German naval gun factories – and the Czar of Russia’s
ordnance plants at St. Petersburg.
An old-style Yale lock secured the door to the laboratory
storeroom that dispensed supplies to the engineers
and scientists. Yamamoto picked it open quickly. Inside,
he searched cabinets for iodine. He poured six ounces of
the shiny blue-black crystals into an envelope. Then he
scrawled ‘crystal iodine, 6 ounces’ on a requisition sheet
with the initials ‘AL’ for the Gun Factory’s legendary chief
designer, Arthur Langner.
In a distant wing of the sprawling building, he located
the test caisson where armor experts simulated torpedo
attacks to measure the awesomely magnifi ed impact of
explosions underwater. He rummaged through their magazine.
The sea powers locked in the international race to
build modern dreadnought battleships were feverishly
experimenting with arming torpedoes with TNT, but
Yamamoto noted that the Americans were still testing
formulations based on guncotton propellants. He stole a
silk bag of Cordite MD smokeless powder.
As he opened a janitor’s closet to filch a bottle of
ammonia water, he heard a watchman coming. He hid in
the closet until the old fellow had shuffl ed past and disappeared
among the guns.
Swift and silent, Yamamoto climbed the stairs.
Arthur Langner’s drawing loft, which was not locked,
was the workshop of an eccentric whose genius spanned
war and art. Blueprints for stepped-thread breeches and
visionary sketches of shells with smashing eff ects as yet
unheard of shared the workspace with a painter’s easel, a
library of novels, a bass violin, and a grand piano.
Yamamoto left the Cordite, the iodine, and the ammonia
on the piano and spent an hour studying the drafting
tables. ‘Be Japan’s eyes,’ he preached at the Black Ocean
Society’s spy school on the rare occasions that duty allowed
him home. ‘Take every opportunity to observe, whether
your ultimate mission is deception, sabotage, or murder.’