Abandoned City

A tactical nuclear weapon is discovered inside the Kyushu Telecom Tower in Fukuoka, and roughly 35 million residents are cleared out over five days so the Ground Self Defense Army can safely disarm and remove it. Suspicion lands on militant refugees, yet Section 9 doubts that account and, with the Prime Minister's blessing, enters the emptied zone to examine the device firsthand. Borma and Pazu draw the task of inspecting it. At first it reads as a dirty bomb, but Borma spots traces of an implosion design that depends on American explosives, a finding that baffles the disarming crews, since the refugees have always favored C-4.

As the two work on the defusing, Batou takes Gouda onto the tower roof and, drawing on the Major's external memory, sets about wounding the man's pride, branding him second-rate, unremarkable, and a mere imitator. The provocation pays off: Gouda offers his own reading of the case and, in the process, lets slip details only the mastermind behind the whole affair could possibly know.

The Major and Saito commandeer a GSDA disposal truck and, posing as the removal team, make off with the bomb's plutonium. She means to rush it to Spring 8, where technicians might tie it to the plutonium from the CIS-run nuclear plant in the Uchikon 7 sector of New Tokyo's Shinjuku Refugee District. Because the unit is certain Kuze never obtained plutonium in Russia, proof that the Cabinet Intelligence Service planted the bomb would undercut the swelling cry to expel the refugees. Meanwhile, Aramaki presses the Prime Minister not to send in the Ground Self Defense Army, and though she feels boxed in by evidence that keeps pointing at the refugees, at his urging she agrees to lay his report before the cabinet in hopes of averting a civil war.

The line scrawled on the weapon, 'To Kayabuki with love,' nods to Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Like Fukuoka, Nagasaki lies on the island of Kyushu, and before that bomb was loaded aboard its aircraft, U.S. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell personally inscribed on its casing a message addressed to Hirohito with love and kisses.