Ghosts of Bungo Suido

SEVENTEEN

Gar popped up a moment later, suddenly conscious of the boat’s thrumming starboard propeller going by much too close for comfort. Pursued by more shell splashes, the Dragon disappeared in a roil of white water. A moment after that, as he surfaced in the tumult of her submergence, he heard the roar of aircraft engines and then the whistle of falling bombs. He literally didn’t know what to do next, but then there was a tremendous punch from below. It felt as if his innards were being strained through his rib cage, and then he was airborne, his arms and legs windmilling in the night air. The last thing he remembered was pulling the CO2 lanyard on his life vest just before hitting the sea.

When he came to, he was lying on a wet wooden deck. He was on his belly, his head turned to one side, his arms extended alongside his body with palms up, and his legs stretched straight out behind him. His ears were still ringing, but he could hear the excited gabbling of Japanese and feel the deck heeling as whatever kind of ship he was on made a hard turn. His left ear was supported by the bulge of his still-inflated life jacket. He blinked the saltwater out of his stinging eyes and focused on the searchlights stabbing out into the darkness around him. One came from behind; another, dazzlingly bright, came from the wing of an aircraft that was buzzing overhead. In the light he saw a Japanese minesweeper boring in and dropping depth charges over an already disturbed area of the sea.

Gar was cold, wet, and concussed, but he was able to work out what was happening. They’d been jumped by minesweepers, not destroyers. Wooden hulled and diesel powered, not quite 200 feet long, but armed with depth-charge racks and a mine-hunting sonar. He watched in growing dismay as the spotlighted boat made its run, then turned out of the cone of light and away from her erupting depth charges; he felt the deck heel sharply as his sweeper followed its partner in to the target area. The plane flew around the action at low level, keeping the whole area lit up as they tried to find and kill Gar’s submarine. Unable to raise his head, he closed his eyes and stopped watching.

Had they made it down soon enough? Deep enough? Those bombs had gone off pretty close to the surface, so maybe, maybe … but there was something ominous about that large patch of foaming sea, reflecting an occasional sheen of oil. He heard orders being shouted behind him, then felt the thump of depth-charge projectors going off amidships. He could feel the wooden hull trembling as the diesels pushed the sweeper in at full power.

Go, Dragon, go, he thought. Dive, turn, dive some more, turn the other way, all on one lone shaft, while two FM sonars and a radar-equipped plane extended electronic talons deep into the sea, hungrily grasping for one little blip.

The searchlight above and behind Gar went out, and then came the underwater explosions on either side as his sweeper’s depth charges exploded.

Shallow, he thought. Much too shallow. These guys were excited; they’d failed to think it through. The blasts raised tremendous waterspouts into the darkness, confirming the shallow settings. They were spectacular, but the ones that did the business had to get down to 300 feet if you wanted to see debris, bodies, dead fish, and fuel oil erupting to the surface. He felt the sweeper slowing down as they waited to see what happened next.

Something kicked his right shoe, and he heard some more rapid-fire Japanese. It sounded like two men were arguing, probably over whether to keep his inert body on board or just pitch it over the side.

A third voice joined in, an older, deeper voice, ringing with authority. He heard two almost simultaneous “Hai!” Argument settled, orders given. He continued to play dead, although he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to go back into the cold water. As he felt hands grasping at his wet trousers and shirt, a powerful explosion went off under the sweeper and split it into two pieces. A Cutie? The shock knocked the men who’d been grabbing at his clothes off their feet and, he was pretty sure, right over the side. Gar wasn’t hurt because they’d just lifted him a few inches off the deck when the Dragon’s farewell gift swam silently in from behind and killed the sweeper.

One thought stuck in his mind as he tumbled back into the sea: They’d made it. They’d evaded, then sent up the acoustic homer to go find some Japanese iron. Or, in this case, wood. Then another thought occurred to him: Or had his sweeper hit a mine? He looked up over his shoulder as the front half of the sweeper leaned over and subsided into the sea with the rest of them.

The rest of them.

There were several Japanese swimming away from the wreck in the darkness. Gar couldn’t see them, but he could definitely hear them. It sounded like officers were telling their people to get out of there, and then he remembered why. There were depth charges on board, and once they left port, the Japs always carried them armed.

He tried to swim away, too, but discovered that his muscles were not going to cooperate very much. His life jacket, still partially inflated, got in the way. The best he could manage was a miserable dog paddle into the dark, away from the sinking ship, the pooling diesel fuel, and all those Japs. He’d been on the bow when the explosion hit, so any remaining depth charges ought to be in the other direction. He turned to his right and paddled harder, trying to quash the nausea rising in his stomach from the fumes. His legs felt like cold rubber, and he was having trouble concentrating. A couple of times he forgot why he was swimming away from the wreckage, where there ought to be pieces to hang on to. It had been a minesweeper. There’d be wood. Of course, the Japs would figure that out, too, and he’d have to expect a fairly hostile welcome if he tried that.

He felt rather than saw or heard a distant underwater explosion. Not a depth charge, but something else, similar to what they felt when one of their own torpedoes went off in the guts of a Jap ship a mile away. There was a second explosion, muted, as if deeper. Had the Dragon hit a mine? Gar didn’t want to think about that. Except there shouldn’t have been mines there. Too deep.

Suddenly a white light flooded the area. Between that and the saltwater in his eyes, he couldn’t see a thing. He felt the pressure of a bow wave coming, and soon another wooden hull was bumping along beside him. Once again he heard jabbering topside, and then a bowline dropped down in front of him. Instinctively he slipped into it and was unceremoniously hauled aboard like a stinky fish, which he probably resembled at that point. Once he flopped down on the deck he heard several hissing intakes of breath. He didn’t help matters by rolling over on his side and puking all over their nice wooden deck. By then there were more shouts from alongside, and they went back to work; one guy who looked like a sumo wrestler sat on his haunches, staring at Gar like he was considering the best way to turn him into chum.

They worked at picking up more survivors from the other minesweeper while Gar lay curled up on the deck in his own effluent. Unless the Dragon was still in the area, setting up for another homing torpedo attack, they were all probably safe for the moment. As his mind cleared in the cold night air, he realized he had real problems here. If they figured out that they’d caught the commanding officer of a U.S. submarine, Gar was bound for a torture chamber somewhere in Tokyo. He was pretty sure his jumpsuit had no indications of rank on it, but he was wearing a khaki uniform shirt underneath, complete with shiny silver oak leaves. The minesweeper crew might not know that meant he was a commander, USN, but someone ashore probably would.

He opened his eyes to see if the sumo was still staring at him. He was gone. As surreptitiously as possible he got the oak leaves unsnapped and quietly disposed of over the side, but that still left a clear indication that there had been rank insignia on his shirt. Then he remembered his lucky charm, his CPO insignia.

He curled up into an even tighter ball over in the shadows of the bow while the crew looked for more people in the water. It took him a few minutes to get the CPO insignia off his penknife chain and onto one collar of his shirt.

It might work, he thought. He was the right age to be a chief petty officer. Then he remembered his dolphins, pinned above his left shirt pocket flap. They were gold. A chief’s would have been silver. Would they know that? They weren’t polished and, in fact, were pretty tarnished. Still, it was a lingering detail.

Suddenly hands were jerking him off the deck and into a semistanding position, followed by a blast from a fire hose to wash the diesel fuel and his own various secretions off. His face must have been really foul, because they spent some time blasting him in the face with that hose. When that was over, a diminutive officer wearing white gloves and carrying a 5-foot-long bamboo stick that Gar thought was longer than the Jap was tall walked up to him and began a methodical beating the likes of which Gar had never had in the boxing ring. He later found out that the ends of the bamboo had been split into six segments to add to the effect. He screamed the whole time at Gar, who ended up curled back into a quivering ball with his whole hide on fire. It would have been far worse had Gar not been wearing his exposure jumpsuit.

When that was finally over, they threw him literally down the hatch into the bosun’s locker up in the bow of the minesweeper, where he landed on coils of marline, hemp, mooring line, rags, cans of paint, manila mats and fenders, and bales of canvas. The hatch slammed down, and Gar was blissfully unattended. He passed out, almost gratefully.

Reveille came some unknown hours later in the form of a bucket of cold seawater. Gar couldn’t move — every muscle in his body was black and blue from that bamboo massage. The big sumo guy came down the ladder, grabbed him by his jumpsuit, and threw him up the ladder and out onto the deck. That should have hurt a lot, but Gar couldn’t tell the difference. There stood his good friend, the bamboo man, who did it all again, accompanied by loud screaming and chantlike noises each time he swung his magic stick, which was often. Gar did notice it was late daylight and snowing, and they were coming into a harbor of some kind. Actually, he recognized it. He was back at Kure. Physically, but not for much longer mentally.

The next time he came to he was in what he thought was a ship’s steel compartment. It also felt like there were other people there, but he couldn’t see them. His eyes had been beaten shut. He tried to open them, but it wasn’t happening beyond the aching slit stage. He could see a little bit out of his right eye, but not his left. His nose was so full of clotted blood that he had to breathe through his mouth, and that hurt his teeth. He didn’t know how much time had passed since he’d been picked up and beaten half to death on the minesweeper.

“Easy, mate,” an Aussie or possibly British voice said next to him. “Easy, now.”

Gar managed a subdued grunt.

“Beat you fair and proper, they did,” the voice said. “Yank, right?”

Gar grunted again.

“Saw those dolphins on yer shirt,” the voice said. “Know where you are, then, mate?”

Two grunts.

“Yer on the bloody great Shinano, you are. Can I make a suggestion?”

One grunt.

Gar felt the man’s fingers relieving him of the gold-plated dolphins.

“These here’ll get you a samurai chop, they will. Yer submarines are fair killing them, in more ways than one. There was one here the other night, by God. Sank two destroyers. Peppered the whole shipyard with a barge-worth of ammo. Blew up the caisson, this whole bloody ship we’re on went off its blocks, banged in the bow, chipped a screw, flooded out a machinery room. These are gold, ain’t they?”

One grunt.

“Was that you lot, then?”

One grunt.

“Brilliant,” he said, obviously impressed. Then his accent changed.

“Look at me,” he said quietly.

Gar tried. His right eye was the only working option. He focused, but nothing happened. Then it did.

A smiling Japanese face was staring right at him. “Fair dinkum,” it said, in a perfect New South Wales accent.

Gar knew he was fucked.

“Captain, isn’t it?” it said.

Truly fucked.

The Jap read Gar’s mind and, with a vicious smile, nodded his agreement with Gar’s all too obvious assessment.

EIGHTEEN

Admiral Lockwood stood behind his desk with a pained expression on his face, a message clutched in his hand. This was potentially a real disaster. Dragonfish had reported in after getting clear of Bungo Suido and the minesweeper trap. She’d been damaged by the aircraft attack and was limping back to Guam. That wasn’t the big news. The big news was that Gar Hammond had been lost overboard in the process of an emergency dive. That led to an even bigger question: Had he been killed or had he been captured? If he’d been captured, and they made him talk as only the Japs could do, the entire war effort might be in great jeopardy, because submarine captains were privy to the fact that navy cryptographers were reading the Japanese navy’s message traffic.

“We have to assume he’s been captured,” he said. “You know, always assume the worst.”

Forrester nodded. “Have we informed PacFleet?”

Lockwood shook his head. “I’m gonna have to go up to Makalapa and do this one personally with Chester Nimitz. Christ on a goddamned crutch. If they find out about ULTRA…”

Forrester got up and started pacing around Lockwood’s spacious office.

“Nimitz will remember Hammond, won’t he,” he said. “Of all the skippers…”

Lockwood turned toward him. “You really don’t like Hammond, do you, Mike?”

“No, sir, I do not. Much too much ego, insubordinate, disrespectful, and generally a pain in the ass. With all the quality people we have waiting in the wings, it would just have to be a guy like that who’s now got the most important secret of the war in his hands. Jesus!”

“Yet he managed to get a boat into the Inland Sea,” Lockwood pointed out, “through the graveyard of Bungo Suido, and then all the way to the piers at Kure. And back out again, almost, anyway. That’s no small accomplishment.”

“When they start pulling his teeth out one at a time with red-hot rusty pliers, we’ll see about that,” Forrester said.

Lockwood, somewhat surprised by the intensity of Forrester’s animus toward Hammond, shook his head. “I’ve never, ever, hoped and prayed for someone’s death, but just now … okay, call my driver. I’ve got to go up the hill.”

“I’ll get a message off to Dragonfish,” Forrester said. “Get more details on what happened, and their thoughts on survivability. It is December, and Japan’s a cold goddamned place in the winter.”

Lockwood, his lips compressed into a thin, flat line, reached for his brass hat.

As it turned out, it was something so trivial it was almost heartbreaking that had given him away: the two letters CO stenciled on the back of Gar’s exposure suit. The gold dolphins hadn’t helped, because Gar’s name was engraved on the back. The Japanese officer who happily explained all this to him spoke colloquial English, in various dialects, and boasted of having seven other languages besides. He was a perfect mimic and proud of it. He was also an officer in the Kempeitai, which was ostensibly the gendarmerie, or MPs, of the Imperial Japanese Army. According to SubPac briefings, however, they were really a Japanese version of the German Gestapo. This one was in his late thirties, wearing an army uniform with prominent black stripes, and he appeared to be quite fit.

Gar tried to look around. There were several other prisoners, each sitting with his back to a bulkhead, hands tied behind him, and each blindfolded with a dirty rag. His captor lit up a cigarette for himself and offered Gar one. Gar shook his head, gingerly. He didn’t want it falling off.

“Know where you are, Captain?” the Jap asked.

Gar recalled him saying Shin-something, but that meant nothing to him. Unh-unh, he grunted.

“You are onboard His Imperial Majesty’s newest aircraft carrier, Shinano!” he said, crying out the last word with great pride. “The largest carrier in the entire world. Was that why your submarine was sent here? To sink Shinano? Can’t be done, you know. Not by a single submarine, anyway. Especially with your puny torpedoes. You did frighten everyone, I’ll give you that. But sink this ship? Never!”

Gar said nothing.

“Listen carefully, Captain. There are, of course, things we need to know, but we will not pursue those things here and now. Later, in Tokyo. You are going to Ofuna, our navy’s special information center. Ofuna has, how shall I put this, experts in information retrieval. Especially when it comes to submarine officers, of which we see so few. I have been assigned to escort you to them. This ship is preparing to sail soon, to go from Kure to the Yokosuka naval arsenal for final fitting out. This is also how you will journey to Ofuna. Okay?”

Gar nodded, wincing at the way his neck bones creaked. Stick to grunting, he thought. The Jap shifted to his version of a British accent. Showing off.

“Excellent, my good man. Look here, I have a proposal for you. We shall treat each other with respect, as officers of similar rank. We are not friends, of course. We are enemies. But for now, for this voyage, we can have a truce, if you agree. I will not interrogate you or subject you to any more, um, physical stimulation. You will not attempt to escape or to inflict sabotage. In fact, I will give you a tour of this great ship. I want you to understand that Japan is not defeated, that we are much stronger than you Americans think we are. Do you agree to behave? Will you give me your word, then, as an officer?”

Why the hell not, Gar thought. This was probably some clever Asian ploy to gain his confidence, bind Gar to his protector, and then suck up some intelligence on the sly. Fair enough. That was his job. Gar’s job was to give name, rank, and serial number, and otherwise keep from getting killed if at all possible. The fact that they knew he’d been the captain of the sub that had savaged Kure was probably what was keeping him alive right now. They had to wonder how that had happened. Captains knew things, and there was plenty of time afterward for reprisals.

“I give you my word,” Gar said, muffling his sibilants through wobbly teeth.

“What is your name, rank, and serial number, please?”

Gar recited.

His captor called in Japanese to two soldiers standing nearby. They came, lifted Gar up, and helped him limp out of the compartment and into a long passageway. Both eyes were working again, sort of, anyway, which was a relief. The deck was not tiled, as was the case with USN ships. It was shiny steel. Gar also noticed that there were no watertight doors where he would have expected hatches, but then he realized they might be well above the waterline, where hatches would be superfluous.

He was delivered to what looked like an unoccupied officer’s stateroom. It was barely furnished, with a single two-tiered bunk bed, a desk, a chair, a washbasin, and a locker. The room was perhaps 6 feet wide and 10 long. There was a ventilation duct in the overhead, and a telephone handset was mounted on the wall. They sat him down in the chair. Gar put his stinging hands in his lap and waited for whatever was coming next.

Moments later a steward showed up, or at least that’s how he was dressed — white cotton trousers under a white tunic, wooden sandals on his feet. He was extremely deferential in the presence of the Kempeitai officer, never once raising his eyes off the deck. He proffered a wooden tray with some rice balls, a cup of what Gar assumed was tea, and a small stack of hot, damp white cloths. Gar’s captor indicated for him to put the tray on the desk. The steward then backed out of the stateroom, bowing repeatedly as he went.

“I will leave now,” Gar’s escort said. “Clean yourself, eat something, rest. I will return in two hours.”

“What is your name, please?” Gar asked.

The man hesitated. “That is strictly forbidden,” he said finally. “Wait, I know. You may call me Charlie Chan.”

Gar looked at him through puffy eyes. “Charlie Chan is a Chinese master detective,” he said.

“True,” he said. “But we have conquered them, too, yes? And you’re next, of course.”

He stepped out into the passageway, then closed and quietly locked the door. Gar sat there for a moment, taking stock. All this civility, now food and hot cloths, a stateroom — so why did he feel like a steer in a Nebraska feedlot? Go ahead, eat up. Eat as much as you want. We insist. Really, we do.

On that famous other hand, he could be tied in chains down in the bilges somewhere, subsisting on whatever water dripped down through the gratings from a leaky steam line. He knew this was a game of some kind, but he also knew his responsibilities here: maintain strength if possible, tell them nothing of value, and escape if he could. So he gratefully used all the hot cloths, drank the tea, and gobbled the sticky rice balls. Then he lay down in the rack, a maneuver that took a few minutes. The two beatings had been expertly administered to inflict as much bruising as possible. The food and tea helped but were no substitute for a handful of APCs. He forced himself to ignore the pain and to go to sleep immediately, wondering if they were at sea already. If this thing was as big as she’d looked through the snow the other night, one might never know.

He awoke not two but eight hours later, according to his watch. He was surprised they hadn’t taken it. The stateroom was dark, with the only light coming from the passageway outside, streaming through a tiny ventilation grate above the door. He tried to move but couldn’t. A moment of panic — had they tied him up? Then he realized it was his muscles that were tied up, having been well and truly tenderized by that furious banshee on the minesweeper.

Eventually he did manage to get up and find a light switch and the basin. He tried to make some water come out of the single tap, but there was only the hiss of air going the other way. The water line wasn’t activated. He wondered how much more of this behemoth wasn’t finished yet. The passageway outside the door was quiet, but there were things, industrial things, going on throughout the ship. He tried to feel whether they were moving, but concluded they were still parked alongside the pier.

Fifteen minutes later he heard the lock click in the door, and then Charlie Chan was back. He’d changed uniform and was wearing a light jacket this time. The two guards were right behind him, standing at loose attention out in the passageway.

“What ho, Captain,” he chirped. “I say, you do look a frightful mess.”

British Charlie Chan. Gar tried to think of something witty but ended up just staring at him.

“It’s time we had a tour, you and I. First, the jakes, eh, what? Then a tour of His Imperial Majesty’s most amazing new ship.”

He spat out something in Japanese, and one of the goons came in and slipped a pair of handcuffs on Gar. They were steel rings but with what felt like a silk cloth between them, long enough that he could have put his hands in his pockets if he’d wanted to. They then attached what looked like a white leash to his left hand and handed the other end to Charlie Chan.

“A few rules,” Charlie said. “First, you must walk behind me, no closer than two feet. You must keep your eyes cast down except when I show you something I specifically want you to observe. If one of the crew or the shipyard workers says something to you, you are to keep silent and not look him in the face. And otherwise, do not speak. Okay?”

He stepped out of the stateroom and tugged on the leash. Gar followed him down to the head, where he was unleashed to make morning ablutions. Gar pretended not to notice that his urine was red. Before they left the head, he was handed a loose white garment resembling the top half of a kimono. There were Japanese characters emblazoned on the back. Then they headed what felt like forward because the deck was sloping gently upward. There were others in the passageway, and Gar thought he heard soft hisses and giggles as they went by, the Kempeitai officer with his American dog in attendance. Gar did as he had been told and kept his eyes down and his trap shut. He was much taller than everyone around him but felt considerably smaller. One goon led the procession, the other stayed behind Gar, carrying a heavy wooden baton. Gar could just imagine what those characters on the silk jacket said.

They climbed three ladders and then went through a hatch into what had to be the hangar bay. Charlie Chan stopped and told Gar to look around. It was pretty amazing. They were at the back end of the hangar bay, which stretched ahead of them for at least three football fields in length. There were no planes, but the hangar was filed with industrial gear — small tractors, welding machines, cable reels — and a cast of thousands, sailors and shipyard workers, milling about in seeming confusion. There were two large squares of light in the overhead, 50 feet on a side, embedded in what had to be the flight deck some 60 feet above where they were standing. Gar assumed these were elevator access holes, although he didn’t see the elevators themselves.

“Three hundred planes,” Charlie boasted. “And more on the flight deck. All along here, machine shops, repair facilities, elevators to the rooms below with ammunition and spare parts. Much bigger than your Essex class, yes?”

Gar nodded. He’d been aboard one Essex-class carrier in Pearl, and he’d thought that was pretty damn big, but this was overwhelming. He looked up at the sky through those two big squares and was surprised to see the clouds moving aft. His surprise must have shown.

“Ah, yes, Captain, we are at sea. Still inside the Seto, but soon we leave for Tokyo and your new place of residence. Amazing, isn’t it? You cannot feel her move, she is so big.”

Of course, the Inland Sea was perfectly flat. It would be interesting to feel her movements once out in the greater North Pacific Ocean, Gar thought. Or once she had to conduct evasive maneuvers while trying to get by all the waiting subs. Maybe even Dragonfish, assuming she hadn’t joined all those other boats asleep in the deeps of Bungo Suido.

They proceeded up four flights of stairs, or ladders, in navy parlance. That brought them out onto the flight deck and into a wintry breeze and cold gray sunlight. They were definitely still in the Inland Sea, surrounded by small green islands. Even in winter, it was gorgeous. The ship was steaming into the wind, with thin trails of boiler smoke coming out of two oddly canted funnels that leaned out to starboard, away from the flight deck. There were a few hundred men working on the flight deck, welding in tie-downs, installing safety nets, and bolting on HF antennas out on the deck edges. As they walked past the after elevator aperture, Gar could see that the flight deck was armored — it looked like 4 inches of solid steel. Charlie Chan saw him looking. “Yes, Captain, armored steel flight deck. Stop a one-thousand-pound bomb.”

“That must make her very top-heavy,” Gar said.

“So I was told, “Charlie said. “Supposed to be two hangar decks, but she would not have been stable in that configuration. Shinano is a conversion.”

“Really?”

“Yes. She is sister to Musashi and Yamato. Do you know those ships?”

Gar smiled at him. The Japanese had kept those two battleships secret right into 1943. They were the biggest battlewagons ever built, 70,000 tons and 18-inch guns. Shinano had probably started building as a third in the class and then, after their disaster at Midway, the Japanese had opted to finish her as a carrier.

“Yes, we know about those ships,” Gar said. “Also very big.” He decided not to mention that one of them, Musashi, had been sunk. Charlie seemed highly edified that he even knew about them by name. No reason to spoil his good mood.

They continued their walk up the starboard side of the flight deck, heads bent into the rising wind, while the shipyard workers and ship’s officers gawked at the spectacle of the policeman leading a captive with a leash for a tour around the ship’s expansive upper works. By now Gar really wanted to know what had been embroidered on the back of his hopi coat, because there was derisive laughter after they passed by the groups of workers.

They walked to the very forward end of the flight deck, admiring the beautiful scenery ashore, which looked more like a painting than an actual countryside. A few small fishing boats darted right in front of the big ship’s bow in order to cut off pursuing devils. Gar wondered if Hashimoto was out on one of them, patiently waiting for the paper rain. He also remembered Hashimoto describing the Kempeitai police as hated and treacherous dogs. Gar was under no illusions about Charlie Chan becoming his best buddy. He was counting coup, parading the captured skipper of an American sub as his poodle.

“No catapults?” Gar asked him over the buffeting of the wind. His flimsy coat was not built for warmth.

“No need,” Charlie said, indicating the thousand feet or so of flight deck behind them. With a stiff wind over the bow from the ship’s own speed, even a loaded dive-bomber could probably make a takeoff run with ease. Gar saw Charlie looking up at the windows of the bridge on the island structure amidships. Someone was waving to him in the peculiar fashion of the Far East, fingers down in a come-here motion.

“Ah,” Charlie said. “Let us meet Captain Abe, captain of Shinano. He will be very much interested in meeting you.”

Gar was already pretty tired and cold. It felt as if damned near every muscle in his body was in spasm, and he was having a tough time walking and climbing all those ladders. Nevertheless, up they went.

Captain Abe was of average height for a Japanese and looked to be about fifty years old. He was gray and grizzled and had a face that fairly shouted no nonsense. He was wearing blues, his dress cap, and white gloves. Several officers were standing around on the bridge, while a navigation team was quietly doing the piloting as the great ship threaded its way through all the small islands and channels. Quartermasters manned both bridge wings and called in bearings to known points ashore every three minutes.

Gar stood the required two steps behind Charlie as he explained to Abe who, and presumably what, he had on the other end of the leash. He heard the word “Ofuna” again and watched the officers smile. Apparently Ofuna had itself a reputation, Gar thought. He was very conscious of his leash, but he kept his eyes down. He kept telling himself that this was still better than being in the bowels of the ship with the other slaves.

“Captain Abe requests to know the name of your submarine,” Charlie said.

At this point Gar had a decision to make. Stick with the name, rank, and serial number, or answer innocuous questions like this and then begin to feed them some misinformation when the right opportunity presented itself.

“Dragonfish,” he said, and Charlie translated. Abe said something in Japanese.

“Balao class,” Charlie translated. Now it was Abe showing off. Gar nodded but was careful not to look directly at him. Abe spoke again.

“How many submarines will we face on the way to Yokosuka?” Charlie translated.

“Ten,” Gar said without hesitation. “The waters this side of the Japanese Islands have been divided into ten patrol areas. Some have one submarine, some a wolf pack. It will be an interesting journey.”

Charlie looked at him for a long moment before translating. Abe laughed and grunted out a short comment. The other officers also laughed.

“He says, nice try,” Charlie reported. Gar continued to stare down at the deck.

Abe went over to a small desk next to the bridge’s captain’s chair. He opened the desk and withdrew a pistol, which he brought over to where they were standing. Then he asked Charlie a question. Charlie translated.

“Captain Abe wishes to know if you would like to kill yourself now. You are totally dishonored. He will grant you that privilege because you were a commanding officer. You can even use his pistol. Out there, on the bridge wing, where there are drains.”

The bridge went quiet. They were all staring at Gar now, with his leash and multihued, battered face. Gar took care with his words.

“Tell Captain Abe that for us, capture is an unfortunate but temporary circumstance. There is no dishonor in being captured.”

Abe snorted after hearing Charlie’s translation, and some other officers laughed their contempt. Then he spoke again.

“You have no concept of honor, American dog. You are correct about your position being temporary. Since you will not kill yourself, we will have to do it for you. Temporary, yes. This I know.”

“May I speak?” Gar asked Charlie. Abe gestured that he could with a contemptuous wave of his gloved hand.

Charlie translated as Gar made his reply.

“This is what I know,” he said. “In 1942, Japan was supreme in the western Pacific. Now, what’s left of your overseas armies are starving in Malaya, destroyed in New Guinea, and expelled from the Solomon Islands, which even you renamed the Starvation Islands. Rabaul is lost. Tarawa is lost. Kwajalein is lost. Guam and Tinian are lost. The Philippines have been invaded. Okinawa has been bombed. Here in Japan, the flow of oil and food and rubber and tin and coal has been cut to ten percent of what you had coming in 1942.

“You have this one magnificent carrier, and it is very impressive, but it is one carrier. Admiral Halsey has forty-two Essex carriers and thirty-five smaller ones. He is coming with a fleet of five hundred ships. The American navy has more than ten thousand ships. Soon Japan itself will be lost. And yes, Captain, you will run a gauntlet of American submarines if you try to get to Yokosuka.”

Charlie Chan had been slowing down a bit as Gar recited the Japs’ real strategic circumstances. Gar still was not looking Abe in the face; he had a gun in his hand and, Gar suspected, a thunderous expression. No point in giving him an excuse. When Charlie stopped speaking, Abe exploded into a torrent of angry Japanese.

“None of this is true,” Charlie translated. “None of it. Tokyo has told us repeatedly of great victories, of hundreds of American ships sunk, your armies dying in the jungles like insects, your airplanes littering the Pacific Ocean. What you say is lies, all lies.”

“Do you go to Tokyo with a full load of fuel, Captain?” Gar asked. “Is there plenty of food aboard? Dozens of airplanes?”

Charlie hesitated. Abe saw that and pressed him, then hissed in annoyance. He gave a short, sharp order and turned away.

“That is none of your business, prisoner,” Charlie said, but looking nervous for the first time. “You are correct. There is much to be done. He has ordered me to put you to work.”

He passed the leash to one of the goons, who pulled Gar forcefully off the bridge and toward a succession of ladders pointing down into the depths of the ship. The last sight Gar had of Captain Abe was of him slapping the barrel of that pistol into his open palm, as if trying to decide what to do with it.

Oh, well, nice while it lasted, he thought.

NINETEEN

They went down seven sets of ladders, which meant they were nine decks below the carrier’s bridge. They ended up on a mezzanine deck somewhere under the hangar bay. The main engineering spaces were right below them, and this deck contained auxiliary machinery, ventilation fan rooms, motor generator rooms, and a host of other smaller spaces arranged along a passageway on the starboard side of the ship. There Gar joined the rest of the prisoners, who numbered about fifty. They were divided into groups of five, with a Japanese marine in charge of each group.

Gar’s personal goon pointed him at a group of four. When he joined them he was handed a wooden mallet, a blunted chisel, and a basket of oakum fiber. Their job was plain to see: stuff the oakum into every bulkhead penetration in front of them, and then hammer it tight around the cable, pipe, or wire bundle coming through the hole in the vertical bulkhead. As in warships the world over, there were hundreds of penetrations through the bulkheads between adjacent spaces. None of these appeared to have the simple metal device the U.S. Navy used to ensure watertight integrity, called a stuffing tube. On this ship there was just a drilled hole, and they were stuffing it with oakum, as had been done in the seventeenth century. If the space ahead of where they were working ever flooded for any reason, the water would soon be pouring into this space. In damage control parlance, that was called progressive flooding, and it always had one, inevitable result. Oakum was a joke, a bad joke.

They stood on small stools to reach the cableway penetrations that ran along the overhead. Gar wondered why they were bothering. A stuffing tube anchors the caulking material between two metal collars that are permanently attached to the bulkhead. Water pressure on one side pressed the collar into the other side, sealing it. Hammering oakum into the holes gave the impression of sealing them, but he knew that with the first hint of real pressure all that oakum would pop right out, no matter how hard they hammered it. They were kidding themselves, especially if this compartment was below the waterline.

They were not allowed to speak to or even look at each other. Anyone caught looking around got whacked on the head by the ever-ready bamboo baton. Still, Gar could see that most of the prisoners were Allied soldiers or sailors, dressed in the tattered remnants of various uniforms. They were all considerably thinner than he was and bore the many scars of the Japanese army’s hostile indifference toward POWs. In retrospect Gar realized that the captain’s offer to let him shoot himself should not have come as a surprise. Wait until the B-29s come, he thought.

His thoughts were interrupted by sharp commands from the guards. They picked up their baskets and went single file into the next compartment, where they set to work hammering oakum into the other side of their previous efforts. The senior guard finally spotted Gar’s wristwatch and then quickly relieved him of it.

Hours later they were all herded back up several ladders and out into the cavernous hangar bay. From there they were marched to the very back end of the hangar bay, through a long passageway, and out onto the fantail of the carrier. The flight deck extended overhead, supported by crisscrossed I-beams rising out of the steel of the main deck. There they were made to sit in ranks against the final bulkhead, their backs to the cold steel, and their hands in their laps. One of the goons came along the line of sitting men and inspected their hands to make sure they were empty. They showed him palms up, palms down, and then dropped their hands back into their laps. If one didn’t do it fast enough, the guard would reward him with a smack on the elbow from his baton.

Once the hand inspection was complete, the guards clapped handcuffs on each man and passed a steel wire through all the handcuffs, which was then shackled to the deck at each end. After a while two mess cooks came out onto the fantail area, each carrying a wooden tray. The men were allowed to take two rice balls apiece, each impregnated with a single drop of soy sauce. Once the rice had been distributed, the team came back with a black pot and a large copper dipper. They each got to drink one dipper of water.

From the looks on the goon squad’s faces, the POWs were being positively pampered, even though they were outside on a weather deck, sitting against cold steel with no coats or jackets. The sun was going down, illuminating nearby islands and the distant shore with a cold, metallic light. They could see two destroyers plowing along in the carrier’s expansive wake. It looked to Gar like they were making 20 knots. The props below them vibrated more than Gar would have expected for a brand-new ship. An occasional puff of stack gas whipped across the fantail, making their eyes water. The goons stood against the lifelines stretched across the very back of the fantail area, four of them, dressed out in padded vests, woolen trousers, Japanese army caps, and black gloves and carrying their ever-present batons.

As full darkness came, Gar felt movement along the line, as everybody began pressing into the center of the line of sitting men for mutual warmth. A small red light came on above them; it was mounted under the flight deck so as not to show beyond the edges of the deck. The smell of cooking food wafted back along the deck, and the guards, after a final check of the wire, went into a small guardroom just forward of the fantail area. They left the hatch open so they could keep an eye on their charges.

Gar was sore, cold, dead tired, and depressed, and this was just his first day in captivity. Some of these guys were wearing what looked like British uniforms, which meant that they could have been shipped back to the Home Islands from Singapore. That city had fallen almost three years ago. That was not an encouraging thought, nor were his prospects once they got to Tokyo. The Japs had to know the U.S. submarines were strangling them. A captured skipper would be made to sing in detail, and then he would be beheaded. Or maybe just beheaded. On that happy note, he fell asleep.

It was almost seven thirty before Admiral Lockwood got back to his headquarters.

“How’d the boss take the news?” Forrester asked.

“I think he aged a year right in front of me,” Lockwood said. “But after we’d kicked it around for a while, we decided there was nothing to be done. If they break him, they’ll either change their codes or they won’t. If they do, we’ll break ’em again.”

“That’s easier said than done, I suspect,” Forrester said. “Why wouldn’t they change their codes? Disinformation?”

“Sure. They’re Japs. You know, clever Oriental bastards. If they find out we’re reading their message traffic, then they could start throwing in some bullshit, like a fake transit route of the next carrier deployment. Get us to deploy subs — right into a minefield we didn’t know about.”

“Oh, boy.”

“As Nimitz pointed out, we don’t even know if he’s been captured,” Lockwood said. “The waters out there, off Japan? In December? How long would someone floating around survive? An hour? It’s not like he’s going to swim to the nearest Jap destroyer.”

Forrester thought the admiral was starting to whistle past the graveyard. “There’s no way in hell to predict what he’ll tell them, if anything,” he said. “Knowing Hammond, he’ll probably sing like a canary and baffle them with so much bullshit they won’t know what to believe.”

“One can always hope,” the admiral said. “Any word on what happened to that carrier?”

“Weather’s prevented the air force from getting any aerial photography. Snow, low cloud cover, the usual excuses.”

“Oh, c’mon, now, Mike, what good’s a camera when it’s snowing, right? They’ll get out there. Tell me about the deployments for the Lingayen Gulf landings.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Forrester said, glancing at his watch. “I can get a briefer up here, but it’s almost twenty hundred…?”

“Jesus, is it? Okay, tomorrow will do.” He went to the small mahogany cabinet in the corner of his office and retrieved a bottle of bourbon. He offered a glass to Forrester, who declined. Whiskey made his liver hurt.

“Is this goddamned war ever going to end?” Lockwood asked, looking out the windows at the muted lights around the Pearl Harbor lagoon. “Talk about time on the cross.”

“Think how it must be for the POWs out there in Asia,” Forrester said. “We know this has to end sometime, but they have no idea.”

Lockwood raised his glass. “Here’s to Gar Hammond, then. Let’s hope and pray he holds.”

TWENTY

The next day began at predawn. Each man was forced to get up and walk to the lifelines at the back of the fantail. Below the lifelines were woven-steel safety nets, installed to catch anyone falling or being blown off the flight deck above by prop wash or a gust of wind. They were then made to get down into the nets in groups of three.

Welcome to the POW head.

When everyone had had a chance to relieve himself, three prisoners were detailed to man a fire hose and wash down the netting. Gar noticed that the fire-main pressure wasn’t very impressive. U.S. Navy fire mains ran at least at 100 psi; these looked far more anemic. Once again he wondered how much work remained to be done before this ship would be truly ready for sea. He could guess why they were moving her: B-29 photo-recce birds, and then a submarine attack. The naval bases near Tokyo were probably much better defended than these beautiful islands. He jumped when a baton landed between his shoulders. No looking around. Yes, boss, got it.

Breakfast was a repeat of dinner. Two rice balls, with no soy this time, and a single ladle of warm tea. Then a long hike back down belowdecks to continue caulking the cable penetrations. During the night he’d managed to get some information from the guys on either side of him. The prisoners were a collection of army guys from the Southeast Asian theater. They’d been brought from camps in Malaya, Borneo, the Dutch Indonesian islands, and even China. Gar was apparently the only American, and they already knew that he had been the skipper of a submarine. How they knew that he couldn’t fathom. He was surprised to learn that they thought they were getting better treatment here on board this ship than in the camps from which they had been sent.

They spent the day back down in the bowels of the ship, still hammering oakum. There was no midday meal, only a ladle of water every three hours. Then back to the fantail for another night in the cold. One of the prisoners had developed a vicious hacking cough. Three guards took him away before everyone else went on the wire, and they never saw him again. They doubted the guards took him to sick bay. The other guys had been working at a copper mine before this job. They said that anyone who got seriously ill was usually thrown down one of the abandoned shafts. The other prisoners would then be made to shovel ore into the shaft until they could no longer hear the man screaming.

“They’re not human,” Gar commented to his wire mate.

“Neither are we, sunshine. Not anymore.”

When they woke the next morning, the carrier was anchored off the Kure naval arsenal and already surrounded by a dozen barges bringing supplies, fuel, more oakum, in bales this time, and what looked like a variety of electric motors, pumps, and refrigeration machinery. In peacetime a ship as large as an aircraft carrier would take up to two years to fit out, which was the process of installing the tons and tons of equipment needed to turn her into a warship. It was apparent to Gar that they were in a hell of hurry to get her out of here, and the POWs joined the lines of sailors hauling stuff on board from all the barges into the hangar bay for the rest of the day. Gar noticed the one thing they did not bring aboard was any sort of fresh food.

That evening as they were assembled for the wire, Charlie Chan appeared on the fantail and gave orders to the goons. Gar was rousted out of the line before the rice balls came, which hurt his feelings. One goon ahead, one astern, Charlie and Gar in the middle, and with Gar back on his familiar leash, they went forward into the hangar bay and then climbed what seemed like an endless series of ladders. Charlie said nothing to him this time until they reached the bridge, which was full of people. It was obvious the ship was getting ready to heave up the anchor and get under way again. They perched Gar on a binocular storage box out on the port bridge wing, with stereo goons in attendance. Charlie reported to Captain Abe, who looked over at him and made an annoyed face. He said something in Japanese to Charlie, who bowed several times and backed away as if he’d been caught crapping on the deck.

“What did you do?” Gar asked when Charlie came out onto the bridge wing.

“I did what he told me to,” he said. “He told me to bring you up here.”

“Seems to be in a bad mood today.”

“He is very angry, but not at you. You are a distraction. He says the ship is not ready to go to sea, but that Tokyo is insisting. There was another B-29 today. They fear a major bombing raid.”

Gar thought of several clever things to say but kept his mouth shut. Charlie noticed.

“Did they feed you tonight?”

Gar shook his head.

Charlie bowed slightly. “I am sorry. No one has eaten. There is no electricity in the main galleys. Something happened.”

“In my navy, we’d say they are working on it.”

He nodded. “Yes, they are. If there is no food soon, some engineers will be shot.”

That oughta do it, Gar thought. He could just imagine what his snipes would think of that logic. On the other hand, there probably would be food. Gar must have smiled, because Charlie asked him what he was thinking. Gar told him.

Charlie didn’t smile, but his face did soften. He dismissed the goons and then just stood there, looking out over the bullrail. The sun was going down, and they could hear the clattering of the anchor chain from under the extended bow, nearly 500 feet away. Despite his perfect military bearing, Charlie looked apprehensive.

“What is your name, please?” Gar asked.

Charlie looked down and began to repeat that that was forbidden. Gar held up his hand, and Charlie stopped.

“We’re going out to sea tonight, aren’t we?” Gar asked.

Charlie nodded.

“We’re going to die, then,” Gar said. “I was telling the truth the other day. There are at least ten submarines waiting for us. Only one has to get lucky. This ship will never see Tokyo Bay. So: I would like to know your name.”

“So you say,” Charlie replied. “Captain Abe sent for you. He wants you to watch as we outrun all these imaginary submarines. If they do shoot torpedoes at us, they will bounce off. This ship began life as a battleship. Belowdecks there is heavy, heavy armor. Our Type 97 torpedoes could do some damage. But yours? I am told that half of them do not even explode.”

He’s got me there, Gar thought. The Bureau of Ordnance had finally admitted there was a problem with their fish and fixed them — but only after two years of complaints from the submarine force, with the bureau blaming all the problems on the submarine skippers. Apparently, the Japs weren’t the only ones with a hidebound headquarters bureaucracy.

The wind freshened as the ship turned toward the west to go around Etajima and then head southeast for Bungo Suido. The city lights had been doused in Hiroshima, probably due to that B-29 recce flight, which reinforced Gar’s notion that the Japs knew exactly what was coming one of these days in the form of an aluminum overcast. Captain Abe came out onto the bridge wing to study some navigation features. He looked Gar up and down as he sat forlornly on the binocular box, then snapped something at Charlie Chan.

“He says he is glad you will get to watch tonight. That once we leave Bungo Suido, your personal defeat and dishonor will be complete, as we outrun all those hundreds of submarines outside.”

“Ask him what about the other submarine that came into the Seto with us. Does he know where she is hiding — and waiting?”

Charlie translated, and Abe did a double take. Gar didn’t think that possibility had even crossed the captain’s mind. Then he barked out a loud Ha! He said something in Japanese to the other officers. They all laughed in unison. Abe gave Gar a dismissive wave and went back into the pilothouse. Thirty minutes later they steamed around the western end of Etajima and were met by four destroyers. For all their scorn, it seemed they weren’t letting Shinano sail anywhere all by herself. Two of the tin cans fell in ahead of the carrier, two astern. They picked up speed as they headed down toward the straits. The night was clear, but the islands they passed were all darkened, with no navigation aids illuminated. It was getting colder, and Gar was starting to shiver. Charlie went into the pilothouse and came back out with a quilted Chinese-style jacket for him. Gar put it on but was unable to button it up. His wrists stuck out of the sleeves a good eight inches. Charlie pretended not to notice. Gar knew he looked ridiculous, but he was very grateful for the coat. The lookouts, who were stationed up on the level above them, were wearing similar coats.

“Major Yamashita,” Charlie said, suddenly. “My name is Yamashita. My uncle is a lieutenant general in the Imperial Army. He rules the Philippines.”

Gar nodded. “Thank you,” he said. He won’t rule them for much longer, he thought. Dugout Doug MacArthur was on the move, at long last.

They passed through the Hoyo Strait without incident and then headed down into Bungo Suido. Three minesweepers were in line-abreast formation ahead of them now, and Shinano slowed to 5 knots so that they could follow in the sweepers’ wakes. The after lookouts on the small wooden ships must have been apprehensive at the sheer size of the carrier following them through. The swept channel appeared to be right down the middle with two sharp turns halfway through. Gar could hear the navigation team gabbling away inside the pilothouse and lots of sharp Hais and Dozos from the bearing takers, who were manning alidades on the next level up. He couldn’t see the bow of this ship; the flight deck extended over the forecastle area just as it spread over the fantail back aft. The two giant square holes in the flight deck gave the whole structure a weird appearance.

Gar wondered if his Dragon was lurking out ahead, waiting for them to come out. Or had those two distant booms been her death knell as she darted into a minefield they didn’t know about? Gar had trouble picturing himself as the sole survivor. Major Yamashita had gone back into the pilothouse to watch the navigation through the minefields. It wasn’t as if he had to guard him. It was a good 50 feet down to the armored steel flight deck, and nearly 80 more to the water if he decided to go over the starboard side. Besides, if they were going to run the torpedo gauntlet that Gar knew was out there, he’d much rather be up here than ten decks below.

Charlie came back out to the bridge wing bearing two flat boxes, the shape and size of cigar boxes.

“Eat,” he said.

Gar had no idea of what he was eating, but it was surprisingly good, if distinctly fishy, and he finished every scrap, eating with his caulk-stained fingers.

“Thank you very much,” he said. “You are very considerate.”

Charlie — he had to quit calling him that — Major Yamashita seemed a bit embarrassed by that. “It will take all night to reach the approaches to Tokio-wan,” he said. “I think Captain Abe wants you here for the whole trip.”

“Fine by me,” Gar said. “This is not a night to be belowdecks.”

The major gave him an exasperated look. “Nothing will happen, Captain,” he declared, but his tone of voice had a certain whistling-past-the-graveyard edge to it. That was reinforced by a sudden commotion inside the pilothouse. Major Yamashita eased closer to the door to see what the fuss was about. Then he sucked in a great quantity of air through his teeth.

“Radar,” he said. “The radio room has detected submarine radar.”

“Just one?” Gar asked innocently.

Yamashita grimaced. He was an army major out at sea on what had to be the most valuable submarine target of the war, and now he knew there was at least one American boat out there in the darkness with meat on its mind. The minesweepers fell off to one side as the carrier increased speed, followed by a broad turn to port. She’d begun a zigzag plan, and the tin cans up ahead generally were matching her movements. Just to add to the fun, a crescent moon appeared out of the cloud layer and lit up the sea. My kind of night, Gar thought. He tried to gauge her speed, but the ship was so big he really couldn’t tell. That vibration was back, though. He could feel it trembling through the binocular box.

We did that, he thought. Damaged a propeller, blunted the bow. Maybe it’ll slow her down. If she could run at full speed, and for a ship of this length that would be 30 knots or faster, none of their subs could ever end-around her. She’d have to run right over one to be in danger. That’s what the Wounded Bear, IJN Shokaku, had done, run at 30 knots all the way home. By the time each of the American subs had detected her, she was already out of range and disappearing over the horizon.

Shinano leaned to port in a ponderous turn as she executed the preprogrammed zigzag plan. If the chase became a horse race, a zigzag plan was a double-edged sword. It could screw up a firing solution if the target made a wide course change just as the torpedoes were approaching. The truth was, however, that ships were usually going from Point A to Point B when they went to sea. Through some clever plotting techniques, American subs could determine the base course underlying the zigzag plan and prepare their own torpedo approach on that. Your target could twist and turn, but she would always end up making that base course over the ground, and effectively lose some speed of advance doing it. Drive up ahead of her if you could on that base course, and she’d eventually come right into the loving arms of your TDC and its lethal progeny, six hungry steamers.

Then there was more commotion in the pilothouse, with lots of excited reports coming up on their version of the bitch-box. At the same time, Gar heard some of the carrier’s forced-draft blowers spooling down out on those Leaning Towers of Pisa that were her oversized stacks. The major was frowning as he listened. Gar guessed something had gone wrong down in one of the boiler rooms, because the ship was definitely slowing down. Gar pretended not to notice. They were two hours out of Bungo Suido, and this was prime hunting territory. Archer-fish, for instance. Gar knew that there were two, not ten, more patrol areas north of this area. If Archer-fish made a sighting but could not catch this big boy, she’d certainly flash the word by radio to the other two, but not before Joe Enright had taken at least one shot.

Gar was getting sleepy. He suspected he was the only one on the bridge that night who was. The unexpected food was probably to blame. He wanted to stay awake. This was probably the most unusual vantage point of the war — Japan’s biggest carrier steaming into genuine Injun Country with a U.S. sub skipper in a box seat. Gar wondered what Captain Abe was thinking right now; he hoped not about throwing the resident Jonah over the side. Gar wouldn’t have blamed him.

It was also interesting to watch Major Yamashita as the excitement level rose in the pilothouse. Gone was the cocky military police officer. He was an army guy in a navy setting, and Gar thought he was starting to pucker up a little. In an army fight you could dig in or bug out if you thought you were facing something overwhelming. At sea you had no choice but to face it. Gar’s offhand but dire predictions hadn’t helped, and even as the ship’s captain scoffed, Yamashita seemed to be much less willing to go into the pilothouse to find out what was going on. A case of not wanting to know, perhaps.

The carrier was still executing her zigzag plan, making bold turns to the right and then, five or six minutes later, back to the left to foil any incipient torpedo data computer solutions being generated somewhere out there in the darkness. Gar couldn’t see the escorting destroyers, as they were all running darken-ship, but occasionally red flashing-light messages came from ahead, where the destroyer division commander was riding one of the tin cans. Gar hadn’t seen any radar screen consoles in the pilothouse, and he couldn’t remember seeing radar antennas up on the mast. All that could have been planned for the eventual fitting-out period up in Yokosuka. He was thus really surprised when the carrier’s red truck lights, which were mounted way up on the mast, started signaling vigorously. Gar could read Morse code, but these were Japanese signals. Use of the truck lights instead of directional signal lights meant that the carrier was sending an urgent visual signal to all the destroyers simultaneously. It also meant that if there was a sub out there setting up for a shot, he now had an invaluable visual bearing to add to the computer’s relentless thirst for target data.

The major was definitely getting worried now as the noise level among the bridge officers continued to rise. Something was going on, and Captain Abe’s temper was deteriorating audibly. Gar continued to make himself small in the dark corner of the bridge wing. The major muttered something in Japanese, and Gar gave him an inquiring look.

“Two submarine radars,” he said quietly. He wouldn’t look at Gar as he was saying it, and Gar wasn’t going to provoke him or anybody else up there with any I-told-you-so noise. Then there was a rash of radio chatter inside the pilothouse.

“Ha!” the major said with a triumphant grin. “The destroyers have driven the submarines away. No more radar!”

Or there was a sub out there who’d been running dark and fast on the surface, trying to overtake this beast, and a zig or a zag on the part of the carrier had allowed the boat to submerge and set up a shot. The absence of radar did not necessarily imply the absence of danger.

The wind had increased, streaming across that distant square bow in gusts up to 30 knots. There were hundreds of shipyard workers down on the flight deck below, milling around, staring at the dark ocean racing by or huddling in small groups drinking tea. Gar tried to imagine the excitement in the conning tower of whoever was shadowing them. Big, big target. No identification, because she’d never been seen at sea. Going fast, but then she slowed down for some reason. Four destroyers in the screen, but sticking in close to the target, not ranging out ahead and on the beams, looking for intruders. Now Abe was signaling to all four at once. That was an emergency move.

Gar felt rather than heard the first torpedo hit, way back on the stern.

TWENTY-ONE

It was a nasty, off-axis thump on the starboard quarter, followed by the dull boom of an explosion pushing up a substantial water column behind the ship. It must have scared the hell out of all the POWs chained to the counter back there, not to mention maybe breaking some bones. Gar counted down the seconds, and then came a second hit, farther forward. This one was more muffled, as if deeper, and there was not much of a water column. The third one hit just aft of the carrier’s island structure and packed a real wallop that he felt the full length of his spine. He decided to rise up on his tiptoes, because he knew whoever was doing this had probably fired a full spread of six, given the size of this ship. A fourth explosion blasted into the air just forward of the island, sending up a huge column of water, the spray from which was blown back across the bridge, obscuring the windows in sheets of seawater and causing the carrier to whipsaw a couple of times. The pilothouse was a good 130 feet above the ocean’s surface, so this had been a shallow hit indeed.

As the panic spread inside the pilothouse, Gar waited for five and six, but nothing more came out of the night. Missed ahead, he thought, but four good hits down the same side were going to cause some serious damage. With any luck she’d capsize. There was now pandemonium in the pilothouse, with everybody trying to talk at once until the captain shouted something and they all fell silent. Reports started coming up via the bitch-box. In contrast to the excitement on the bridge, these voices sounded calmer. Gar glanced over at the major, who was holding a fist to his mouth. To Gar’s astonishment, the ship wasn’t slowing down. They were still plowing through the night sea at about 18 knots. He heard gunfire out ahead of them from one or more destroyers, but he was pretty sure that the sub had done her firing submerged. That flashing main truck light, visible in all directions for 10 miles, had been a serious error.

Two junior officers appeared in the pilothouse door and started yelling at Gar. The major jumped, then grabbed his arm. “Captain wants you,” he said.

Oh, shit, Gar thought as the major practically dragged him into the pilothouse and across to the captain’s chair. Abe had a triumphant look on his face as he started yelling at Gar. The major translated while trying to make himself invisible. The bitch-box was going full blast, and there were three officers taking notes and consulting some damage control plates on the chart table.

“He wants to know if you see what is happening. After four torpedo hits, Shinano presses on. She has shrugged off your submarine’s best efforts as the bites of a flea!”

More along that line followed, which quieted the pilothouse as the other officers listened in. When he was finished, Abe looked at him as if expecting some kind of reply. That’s when the ceramic mug sitting on the window ledge by his chair began to move. It slid slowly to the right, all by itself, making a thin scraping noise. Every eye on the bridge focused on that mug as it traveled across the ledge and came to a stop with a tiny clink against a window frame. None of them had noticed, but Shinano was developing a distinct list to starboard. One of the junior officers made a sharp bow toward the captain, then pointed at the centerline, where an inclinometer was mounted in the overhead above the pelorus. It showed a 5-degree list to starboard. Only two minutes after being torpedoed, she was listing.

The major took this opportunity to yell at Gar in Japanese, slap him in the face, and then drag him back out to the port-side bridge wing, as the noise level roared back up inside. Gar was surprised but offered no resistance; he realized Yamashita was getting Gar, and himself, out of Captain Abe’s line of fire — but why, he wondered. Once outside, the major started rubbing the sides of his own face, exhibiting the first signs of genuine fear. Gar gave him a nod of thanks, and Yamashita nodded back.

“It can’t be that bad,” Gar said. “The ship is still going forward at the same speed. If she were in real danger, they would slow down.”

Even as he said that, he noticed that his perch on the binocular box now required the use of his lower legs. It occurred to him that their blind faith in the unsinkability of this carrier might be leading them toward an avoidable disaster. With the ship still going ahead at 18 knots, there would be tremendous hydraulic pressure on the hull ruptures, and Gar knew probably better than anyone on the bridge about the state of below-deck watertight integrity.

“Do we have to stay here?” Gar asked the major.

“We have not been dismissed,” he replied in a shaking voice.

“Don’t you think they’re a little busy in there right now? I think we should go down to the flight deck, where all those people are.”

Yamashita looked over the port bullrail as if surprised to see several hundred men down on the flight deck, most of them milling around in growing disorder. Some of them appeared to be looking through the stacked pallets of materials. Many were wearing hard hats, which told him they were civilian shipyard workers, but there were more than a few ship’s company out there on deck as well.

“We must have permission,” the major said. “It was the captain who demanded you be brought to the bridge.”

At that moment there was a deep rumbling sound forward of the island, and the bitch-box inside lit off with a panicked call. A roar of steam came out of the forward stack. From Gar’s days as a new ensign on a battleship, he knew that volume of steam meant someone had deliberately lifted the safety valves on a boiler. That meant flooding had reached a main machinery space. A moment later, the volume of steam increased. Gar looked back at the major, who was clearly terrified of what he was seeing. He saw Gar looking at him.

“I cannot swim,” he said. Gar couldn’t hear him over the roar of the escaping steam, so he said it again.

Now Gar knew why the major was so scared and, more importantly, why he’d bullied Gar out of the pilothouse. The initiative had passed to him, the prisoner.

“Not a problem,” he said, shouting over the roar of the steam. “I can swim. We need to find the life jacket lockers. There’ll be some on the flight deck, and probably more down on the hangar deck. Come on, let’s go look.”

Yamashita took one more look at the panicked scene inside the pilothouse and said, “Yes, we go.”

They took the exterior ladders down the port side of the island structure. As they went down they saw one of the destroyers closing in on the port side from astern. The flight deck crowd was growing, and so was the starboard list. Gar had to keep one hand on the bulkhead as they scrambled down the ladders. There were no lights showing anywhere on the flight deck, and the civilians were clearly panicked. Gar saw no one wearing a life jacket. Surely they hadn’t gone to sea with no life jackets, he thought. The thunder of escaping steam was beginning to diminish as the boilers bled out five decks below. They were still making way, however, so she had propulsion power available.

When they reached the flight deck, Gar told the major to go find life jackets. He sat down against the island bulkhead, next to a row of pallets filled with tubing and valves. No one seemed to notice him. The white padded jacket helped, and he kept his head down. Then he remembered the prisoners clipped to that wire down on the fantail. He could find his way back there, he thought, and cut them loose somehow, but only if the goons had abandoned them. The major returned empty-handed and more than a little white-eyed. He had to catch himself against the bulkhead to stop his forward motion.

“No one knows where the life jackets are, and there are no boats or rafts. Goddamn navy.”

Gar almost grinned but caught himself. There were hundreds of pallets stacked all over the flight deck; if nothing else they could upend one and use it as a float when the time came, and he was getting more and more convinced that the time was coming. There was a sudden outbreak of yelling as one of the electric trucks they used to move stuff around the flight deck went rolling straight over the starboard side, pausing momentarily in a catwalk before upending and disappearing into the sea. Two sailors trying to catch and stop it went over the side with it. The list was becoming steep enough that some of the pallets themselves were starting to slide.

The escaping-steam noise stopped suddenly as if someone had put a stopper in the escape piping. Perhaps the sea had done that, Gar thought. The ship felt different now, heavier, and the period of her normally ponderous sea roll was increasing. That, together with the fact that she was hanging for a moment at the end of each roll, meant that her stability was being rapidly compromised. She was no longer plunging ahead at 18 knots, either. Gar grabbed the major’s arm.

“The prisoners down on the fantail,” he said. “They are clipped to a wire. I want to go back there and save them.”

Yamashita was beside himself with indecision. His entire world depended on permission, tradition, or actual orders. All of these things were disappearing before his eyes, and this giant ship was leaning over to take a look down into the 3,000 feet of water beckoning beneath her keel.

“You’re an officer,” Gar said. “If you order the guards to release the prisoners, they will do it. Then we can make preparations for going into the water. But we must hurry.”

“You can swim?”

“Yes, I can swim. I will help you, but it would be better to go from the stern than from way up here, yes?”

One of the loaded pallets positioned between them and the rest of the flight deck made a noise and then started sliding toward them. They had to move fast to avoid being pinned against the bulkhead. Other pallets followed their leader. Gar took the lead once they were moving aft, easing his way through the increasingly noisy crowd of frightened shipyard workers on the flight deck. There were some chief petty officers out on the deck now, trying to restore order. They were quickly surrounded by a throng of shouting workers, probably wanting to know where the life jackets were.

They continued aft, away from the increasingly agitated crowd swarming out of the ship and onto the flight deck. The list had stabilized for the moment, but they were still over between 10 and 15 degrees. Gar could feel what was happening, and with that thick armored flight deck, Shinano was already top-heavy. Add to that the tons of stacked pallets and a thousand or so human beings, and the damage control officer had his hands full. Gar found a wool watch cap on the deck, which he pulled down over his head. With that and the padded jacket he was less obviously one of the POWs.

He didn’t know how to get back to the fantail except by going down to the hangar bay. The major balked at that, especially since they were on the downhill side. Going down into the ship was not his idea of safety just then. Gar explained that he needed him to deal with the guards, and that he needed Gar to keep him afloat. They would go down, get those guys freed, and then come back up to the flight deck if Yamashita insisted. The major sputtered about it not being allowed, but then relented as Gar started down an interior passageway ladder on the starboard side. When they came out onto the hangar bay, Gar smelled something that gave him the chills: bilge water. He knew it as a unique smell, a mélange of saltwater, fuel oil, dead marine life, rust, and oil-soaked pipe lagging, all overlaid with a warm, humid blanket of condensed steam. It meant only one thing: The main engineering spaces were flooding.

They made their way aft some 400 feet along one side of the hangar bay. They saw at least three damage control parties furiously working gasoline-powered pumps and another one operating a bucket brigade. For God’s sake, Gar thought. A bucket brigade for a 70,000-ton ship. The dozens of lights embedded along the overhead of the hangar bay were flickering, and Gar could hear the roar of diesel generators in the emergency service rooms on the margins of the bay. The list seemed less extreme down there, closer to the waterline, which made sense. They were probably counterflooding, much the way a sub trimmed its attitude underwater. There was a wet mist visibly gathering along the hangar bay’s overhead, though, which Gar hoped to God wasn’t gasoline vapor.

The final passageway was blocked by overturned pallets of supplies, so they ended up clambering over the mess to get out to the fantail. It was much darker back here, and Gar saw buckled deck plates on the starboard quarter. Two of the diagonal braces for the flight deck had been bent by the blast of the first torpedo. The vibration from the screws was much more pronounced than before, especially the ones on the port side. He wondered if their tips were coming out of the water because of the list. Why the hell hadn’t they stopped the ship? From the size of the wake, it looked like they were still making 10 knots or so.

The good news was that the goons had fled. The bad news was that all the POWs were still attached to that wire, and Gar saw no way to cut it or the lock that attached it to a padeye on the bulkhead. The black water of the Pacific Ocean looked awfully close as he stared at the damage to the starboard quarter of the ship. Then he jumped as a dark gray shape came out of the gloom, passing very close aboard. It was one of the destroyers, and half her crew was topside, holding ropes and nets, obviously bent on taking people off the carrier. The major saw that, and for a moment Gar thought he was going to jump for it, but then the tin can disappeared around the corner of the fantail.

Then one of the POWs recognized Gar and gestured excitedly, pointing at a firefighting ax mounted to one of the flight-deck support beams. He climbed up the sloping, buckled deck and took it down. As he headed for the end of the wire, one of the goons stepped out on the fantail and started yelling at him, brandishing his baton indignantly. The major went at the man in his best imperial army voice, bracing him up against the front bulkhead and shouting the harshest Japanese Gar had ever heard. Gar went behind the major and got to the padeye, stuck the pick end of the ax into the hasp, positioned the ax head for leverage, and pulled with all his much-diminished strength. He did it four times before he felt something happening, cheered on the whole time by the trapped POWs. Then he heard what sounded like a warning shout and instinctively ducked as the goon’s baton whistled over his head and smacked the bulkhead.

Gar didn’t hesitate — he thrust backward with the ax handle and connected with the guard’s groin. He went down with a gasping whimper, curling up into a writhing ball of pain. Before Gar could do anything else, the major calmly came up behind the disabled guard and hit him on the head with a chain stanchion he’d found somewhere. The guard’s eyes rolled up into his head and he lay still.

Gar took the ax back to the padlock and finally broke it apart. The wire went whipping out of that padeye at the speed of heat as the POWs all tried to stand up at once. Then the whole line fell down in a heap due to the list of the ship. While they sorted themselves out, he and the major looked at each other and then dragged the inert body of the guard over to the starboard lifeline and pushed it over the side. It should have taken a few seconds for the splash, but it didn’t. It had been at least 25 feet to the waterline on the night they left Kure. Now it was more like 10 feet. That fact even registered with the major, who made one of those hissing sounds as he stared over the side. The starboard-side screws weren’t turning anymore. A passing swell broke green water over the edge of the buckled deck, as if to make it clear that time was fleeting.

The POWs didn’t wait to thank them or even talk to them. They headed en masse for that passageway and disappeared into the gloom.

Gloom?

The lights had gone out in the hangar bay, except for some emergency battery lanterns mounted along the bulkheads. The POWs were all assholes and elbows disappearing over the clutter in the passageway. The major’s eyes were almost as round as Gar’s as the significance of what he’d done sunk in. He was, after all, a military policeman. Gar grabbed his elbow and told him it would be okay, that he would never say anything, and those POWs certainly wouldn’t, either. Now he had to get him back topside before he completely lost it — but then Gar realized they’d waited too long.

TWENTY-TWO

A rumbling sound began deep in the hull. Gar immediately recognized it, having heard it before as a submarine skipper: the sound of collapsing bulkheads deep in the ship, the bang of huge sheets of steel giving way under the relentless pressure of the ocean, the pinging of rivets blasting around inside compartments. The two remaining screws on the port side slowed to a stop. There was a loud bang, followed by a horrific rending sound, and then they could feel the stern sag down into the sea. She was listing to starboard and settling by the stern at the same time. Gar slid across the wet deck to the lifelines and saw that the water was only a few feet down, if that. The major just stood at the entrance to the passageway, transfixed.

Gar spun him around, and they both pushed into that dark passageway where all the pallets were upended. Gar motioned for the major to grab one while he pulled another out from the mess. Another loud bang, and the ship gave a soft but scary 70,000-ton lurch. Gar could hear foam rising over the fantail. He found a coil of rope in the heap of materials and wrestled it and his pallet—his pallet! — out onto the fantail, the major right behind him. Gar opened the coil of rope and tied the major’s pallet to his, leaving a bight on each end so they could hold on to the pallet once they went over the side.

They actually didn’t have to go over the side. The side came to them in a foamy rush of cold water that swept across the fantail in a hissing series of increasingly larger waves. From up on the flight deck they heard the beginnings of an avalanche of stuff that was now sliding backward along the flight deck. The major was trying to say something, but no words were coming out. The noise got louder and louder — deep rumblings, banging steel inside the ship, and the whoosh of enormous bubbles beginning to pour out of the hull all around them. She was going, and soon.

Gar clambered up on his pallet and wrapped the bitter end of the rope around his forearm. The major did what Gar did. In a moment they were surfing on a wave of water that was making a waterfall off the fantail as the ship’s stern lifted for a moment. Then she settled back again, and they found themselves being pushed away from her by the sheer volume of water being displaced. Their pallets were flipped several times in the process, but they obligingly popped right back to the surface each time. Soon they were a hundred feet or so away from the ship. The major’s face was white as a flounder’s bottom, but he was still hanging on. At that precise moment the moon appeared from behind a bank of clouds, revealing the full scope of the disaster.

My God, what a sight, Gar thought. They could see down the entire length of the flight deck as she settled by the stern, heeling over to starboard by at least a 25-degree angle. Those two outward-leaning stacks seemed intent on pulling her over. The two destroyers alongside were backing away to avoid being hit by the stacks. That maneuver sent up a collective wail from the flight deck, where at least a thousand men were sliding across the deck toward the starboard deck-edge catwalks. Gar lay on his belly across the pallet and motioned for the major to begin kicking with his feet to get away from what was coming. A ship that size going down would suck anything within 500 feet right down with her. The major apparently understood and started flailing away, his eyes screwed shut. They had to really work at it because, once the flight deck dipped far enough for the water to reach one of those elevator openings, she’d go down like stone.

Gar saw one of the destroyers ease back alongside, her bow crunching against the carrier’s side forward of the island structure. The carrier was heeling faster now, and one edge of the flight deck was perilously close to the destroyer’s mast. Some of the officers up on the carrier’s bridge had made it down to the flight deck and were crawling up the inclined flight deck toward the bow. A bright white column of steam erupted from the forward stack, drowning out the cries of the shipyard workers who were trying to get to that destroyer, but it was no use. The destroyer backed away suddenly, and he could see why. The ship was low enough in the water back aft that the after elevator hole was about to start filling. Two more destroyers edged closer to the sinking carrier up at the bow, which was now lifting out of the sea.

“Harder,” Gar yelled at the major. It wasn’t easy to move the pallets. Both of them were hanging over one edge and kicking themselves forward. The major was kicking as hard as he could, but without knowing how to swim, he wasn’t very effective and began to hold Gar back. There wasn’t a thing Gar could do about that. Then he heard a sound like Niagara Falls behind them. He didn’t look back but kept kicking, hoping like hell they hadn’t been going in a big circle. One of the destroyers began sounding the danger signal on her steam whistle. Gar finally ran out of energy and stopped kicking. He looked back to see the front third of the carrier’s flight deck lifting high into the air, the deck’s white directional lines clearly visible in the dull moonlight. He couldn’t see any more scrambling, tiny figures on the flight deck, but a growing cloud of steam, air, and dust boiled out of the front elevator hole, until it, too, began to fill. A moment later, with a weird groaning noise, Shinano disappeared, sliding stern first into 500 fathoms of water. She left an enormous whirlpool, around which Gar could barely make out the hundreds of heads of the men who’d gone over the side as they followed her down into the depths. A minute later all that remained was that cloud of steam and dust, spreading out over the water, as if looking for its source. Gar was overwhelmed. What a colossal waste.

The fourth destroyer emerged from that cloud and nearly collided with one of the others. She backed down furiously and then came to a stop as the other three tin cans began pulling people out of the water. The major had said that Shinano had sailed with nearly three thousand people on board. There was nowhere near that number of heads visible as the four destroyers hauled them out like herring. Gar and the major were perhaps 500 yards away from the rescue operation by this time. Gar was torn — rescue would be tantamount to a death sentence for him. If nothing else, the survivors would equate Gar with the submarine that had just killed their ship and he’d be torn to pieces on whatever deck they hauled him onto, and who could blame them. On the other hand, his chances for survival out there on a small wooden freight pallet in the cold waters of the North Pacific were those famous two.

Gar felt the rope tighten and then relax, followed by a frantic, gurgling cry behind him. He looked around for the major, but he was nowhere in sight. There was a slight chop forming on the sea as dawn approached. The skies were clearing enough for him to see a few stars in the western part of the night sky. He was exhausted, thirsty, and, he realized, dangling shark bait right beneath his pallet. He hauled himself up onto the wooden boards, got it off center, and flipped right back into the water. The other pallet was still attached. Gar pulled it to him, tied the two pallets together to make a bigger raft, and tried again. This time he succeeded by doing the old spread-eagle. He lashed himself to the pallet. He put his head down on the rough-sawn boards and closed his eyes for a minute or so. He was out of the frigid water, so now he at least had a chance.

Within five minutes he was shivering in the light breeze. The air temperature was lower than the sea temperature, so the occasional wave slapping over the semisubmerged pallet actually felt good. He was trying to decide whether he’d survive longer in the sea than on top of it when the pallet bumped into something. He opened one eye and promptly got saltwater in it. Another bump. Then he realized the pallet wasn’t doing the bumping.

He opened both eyes and was face-to-face with the maw of a large shark. The beast had its head out of the water and was looking at Gar with one of its dead eyes. There was a long strip of what looked like a khaki uniform shirt hanging out of the back of the shark’s mouth.

Gar stared for a second, his heart starting to hammer, and then raised his arm and smacked the shark across the face. It was like hitting a piece of sandpaper, but the shark blinked once and then submerged. Gar waited for it to mount a full attack, but nothing happened. His hand stung, and he opened and closed it to restore circulation. He scrunched up onto the pallet, to make sure none of his arms or legs was hanging out, and waited to see what would happen.

A few minutes later came another bump. Gar opened his eyes, unaware that he had closed them. It was darker, but the breeze had dropped. He could smell fuel oil, and he was really cold now, past the shivering stage and entering the early warm-feeling stages of hypothermia. There was something in front of his pallet. He stared into the darkness, trying to make it into a shark, but it wasn’t. It was a human head.

A body, he thought.

He considered what to do, but his brain was very sluggish.

A body.

A clothed body?

He crawled a few inches forward on his pallet raft and reached for the head, hoping it was still attached to more than a single bone.

It was, and he turned it around. The face was Japanese. He felt below the body’s chin and grabbed the collar of a sodden coat.

It took him ten minutes to get that coat off before the body bobbed away from his grasp. He almost lost the coat, too. Once he got it onto the pallet he rolled himself into it. The edges where a zipper would be didn’t close across his front, but the extra layer of fabric, even wet, felt like a greatcoat. He went back to sleep, praying that it was just sleep and not the end of everything.

He awoke to full, warm sunlight and the sounds of excited Japanese. As he tried to gather his wits he smelled the pungent odor of dead fish. He opened one eye and saw a small fishing boat about 10 feet away with four elderly Japanese men staring at him and gabbling. He opened both eyes, blinked, and looked again. Standing wide-eyed at the helm of the 40-foot boat was none other than Hashimoto-san.

TWENTY-THREE

Gar was almost too exhausted to think. He was desperately thirsty. His forehead felt sunburned, and his feet felt like wet rubber. He realized that he had better not “recognize” Hashimoto until he knew where he stood with the rest of the fishing-boat crew.

Moments later he was being hauled aboard like some big fish and deposited on the wooden deck. He heard several hissing intakes of breath and the word gaijin several times. The wooden deck was warm and invited him to go back to sleep, but then a bucket of cold seawater hit him in the face, ending that idea. Then came noise. Someone was yelling at him again, someone who wasn’t happy. Best he could tell, all Japs were seriously into yelling and were absolutely never happy.

Just shoot me, he thought. I am so tired of this shit. Why, oh why, did you bastards come to Pearl Harbor?

A moment later a light fishnet was thrown over his body, and then he was rolling on the deck as they wrapped him up. Sunlight. Wooden deck. Sunlight. Wooden deck. After three rolls they felt secure and he felt like that famous bug in a rug.

Another bucket of seawater, and then a face was in his face. He struggled to focus. It was Hashimoto. He was the one doing the yelling, but from the look in his eye, the look the others couldn’t see, he was trying to tell Gar something. As in, keep still, play along, we’ll talk later. Gar closed his eyes, which brought him a swift kick in the ass. Then they dragged him to the back of the boat and tied him to the cleats on the stern. There was a chock through which he could see dozens of small boats combing the sea. Then he could smell bunker oil. The Japs must have called out every fishing boat from the Kure district to search for survivors from Shinano. He didn’t see any destroyers, but they could have been out of his visual range. He wasn’t any less exhausted from being wrapped in the fishnet, so he went back under.

When next he woke, somebody was gently slapping his face. He opened one eye and discovered Hashimoto kneeling next to him. He thrust a glass bottle of water into his mouth and Gar drank greedily. He pulled it out so Gar could take a breath and then put it back in, as if feeding a baby, looking over his shoulder the whole time. Gar felt the boat’s small diesel chugging away underneath him and realized it was dark.

“I must hide you,” he said. “They must think you go overboard.”

“Um,” was all Gar could manage.

“I cut this off,” he said, indicating the fishnet, “and then put you in the net hole. You stay quiet.”

“Um.”

He quickly cut through the netting and then propped Gar upright. With Hashimoto helping, Gar crawled into a small cubbyhole at the back of the boat. It almost wasn’t big enough for his American-sized body. Hashimoto positioned a wooden hatch, thrust another bottle of water into the cubbyhole, and then closed the hatch with his foot.

“I come for you, by’n’by,” he said. “No noise.”

The cubbyhole stank of fish, and there wasn’t much air. The diesel kept putt-putting away as Gar heard him walk forward. He drank some more water, then wedged the bottle, which had no top, into a corner. The diesel wasn’t running very well, and its exhaust smelled like popcorn. Gar wondered about that for a good ten seconds before falling asleep again.

He woke to the sounds of an altercation between the crew of the fishing boat and some nasty-sounding people who were on either another boat or a pier. Gar turned as soundlessly as he could in his hidey-hole and peeked through a crack in the side. The boat was alongside a pier, and the tide must have been out, because the deck of the pier was a good 8 feet above the boat’s gunwales. Three soldiers were standing on the pier. One of them was blistering the air while the other two, their rifles at port arms, looked bored. From over his head he recognized Hashimoto’s voice answering back.

The noisy one on the pier listened for a few seconds and then said something to his two cohorts. They shifted their rifles into a hip-shot firing position, and everything got quiet. Then a rope snaked up from the deck to the guy in charge. He held the end of it and waited, while the soldiers kept their rifles pointed down at the boat. Gar couldn’t see who else was on the pier, but he suspected any bystanders had left quickly once the rifles were unlimbered. Then the man on the pier began to pull on the rope, and a basket spun its way up. The riflemen put down their weapons and dumped the contents of the basket, a bunch of fish, into a much bigger basket. They repeated this procedure three times until Hashimoto started protesting again. The guy in charge started looking for a way to get down into the boat but couldn’t find one. He pointed his finger down at the boat and scolded some more. Then all three of them hoisted the big basket of fish and backed out of Gar’s sightline.

An argument broke out on deck as soon as the soldiers had left. Gar relaxed as best he could and waited. It was early in the morning, and the skies were gray again. He hoped the tide was coming back in soon. Even if it was, it was going to be several hours before Hashimoto could let him out of the hole. That basket of raw fish was going to look pretty good to Gar about then.

By three hours after dark that night, Gar was ensconced in yet another boat. Hashimoto had rescued him an hour after sunset and taken him out onto the pier and then to a ladder that led down under it. They stepped off the ladder into mud that was at least a foot deep, and suddenly Gar couldn’t move. Hashimoto showed him how to use the framing of the pier to pull each foot out, place it ahead of him, and then let it sink back into the ooze again. The mud smelled of dead fish and sewage in about equal proportions. It was truly eye-watering, and each step was a huge effort.

Then he saw where they were going. Stashed under the pier was the carcass of a fishing boat. There was no engine, screws, rudder, or even a cabin. There was just the hull, covered by a wooden deck that had a rectangular hole where the forward cabin and pilothouse had once been. They climbed aboard the derelict boat and sat down on the deck. Some things wiggled away from them in the darkness. A lone crab stood his ground, watching them. He must have sensed Gar’s intentions, because he suddenly skittered sideways and disappeared right over the side.

Hashimoto sat down beside him, produced a tiny candle from his pocket, and lit it. The smoke was fragrant, driving away the stench of the tidal flats. He then opened a small cotton bag. It contained a small piece of warm fish and a handful of cooked rice wrapped in some kind of green leaf. Gar ate it all in about three bites. He then handed Gar another bottle of water, again with no cap. Gar could see that it was an old beer bottle, and he had a bad feeling about the quality of that water, but even so, it was wonderful to get it. Hashimoto then produced two cigarettes, lit them both, and handed one to Gar. He wasn’t a smoker, but he became one that night, if only to suppress the rank air and drive off some of the larger mosquitoes. Hashimoto settled back on his haunches and gave Gar a look that said, Okay, what the hell happened?

Gar told him the story, from having to send the sub down without him to going over the side as the Shinano met her end east of Bungo Suido. Hashimoto listened in weary silence. He looked older and much thinner. When Gar was finished, he nodded several times and then fished for more cigarettes. Gar shook his head, so he lit one up for himself. In the candlelight he looked like one of those Buddha figures, weary, patient, and imperturbable.

“Goddamn army.” He sighed. “It is very bad here. No food. Army take everything. Army make us go out, then take everything we catch. Army give us fuel, but it is not real fuel. We hide some fish in the boat. They know we do this, but they know we must eat or they will not eat. Village get one sack of rice each month. That is it. Alla farmers’ food, fruit from trees, rice from field, alla the villages’ food, go to army. Children die everywhere. No food. In Hiroshima City, also very bad.”

Gar didn’t know what to say. Having just consumed some of their meager rations, he actually felt a little guilty.

“Last night,” Hashimoto continued, “army come. Officers very excited. All boats must go to sea. Go east, they say. Many submarines attack. Big ship go down. Many people in water. Find navy ships. Find people, bring them back here to village.”

“That was cold water, Hashimoto-san,” Gar said.

The old man nodded. “We knew. When winter comes, you have one hour, maybe two. Then you go to sleep and die.”

“But you had to go out anyway.”

He nodded again. “Army not asking. They tell. We gotta go.”

He told Gar about a hodgepodge fleet of fishing boats all streaming out to sea in the middle of the night, some with army soldiers onboard with their radios. They searched until dawn, and actually picked up some survivors. The dead they left in the sea. There were many dead, and there was a huge oil slick bubbling up like some kind of underwater volcano. The fishermen had heard rumors that a great ship had left Kure under the cover of darkness, but the officers were crystal clear: No one was permitted to know or talk about this. Anyone talking would be shot.

He said they listened to Radio Tokyo every night in the village and heard reports of great victories in China and Southeast Asia, that the Americans were being thrown back to Australia and that the imperial armies were preparing to corner them there and destroy them. They said that the American navy had already been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, and later the remnants had all gone down at Midway. No one believed these reports. Fuel oil was desperately short; even the office buildings and hotels up in Hiroshima City had no heat. Rice was almost impossible to obtain, and people everywhere were trying to grow it in their yards, gardens, and even window boxes. A bridge had collapsed last winter due to ice, and there was no steel to rebuild it. When people went to the hospital, they often did not come back because there were no medicines or doctors. Then there were the B-29s.

Visible originally only as contrails high in the sky, they were now easily distinguished whenever they came over in daylight. With the B-29s came fire, fire in the city, fire in even some of the smaller towns. They no longer dropped big bombs, which seemed to go off all over the place and only occasionally land on a factory or large building. The bombs now came in clouds, tiny things, six, seven pounds, and they spread some kind of jelly all over the place. The tiny bombs were then followed by slightly larger ones, and these lit the jelly on fire, and the combination then ignited the entire city. Just a few weeks ago there had been a terrible fire in the north. The news reports said that it had been extinguished quickly with little damage and not many casualties, but civilians fleeing Honshu told quite a different story, of an entire city burning, flaming figures running down the streets, and there being no air to breathe. Yes, it had been extinguished, but only because there was nothing left to burn.

The people of Honshu were very angry, Hashimoto said. It was one thing to bomb a ship or shoot down an airplane, quite another to set an entire city on fire. Gar told him the reason that he had been told: The Japanese army had dispersed war production throughout the country into the homes of workers in the city. There they made small parts, castings, and subassemblies. These were then sent to the factory where they were assembled into cannon shells, airplane parts, torpedoes, or heavier machinery. Hashimoto said he could understand that, but people on Honshu were killing the crews of any B-29s that parachuted into the countryside on sight.

Which brought them to Gar’s situation.

“I cannot stay here, then,” Gar said. “If the army finds me here, they’ll shoot everybody in the village, won’t they?”

Hashimoto nodded. “Yes. Two weeks ago, army officer found a family listening to American radio from China. They take men away, then burn house. People still inside.”

“When do you go back to sea again?”

“In morning. Early.”

“Can you trust your crew?”

He nodded again. “All family. Whole village, family. No one talk to army.”

“They know you came back from Hawaii?”

“They know.”

“Why did you come back, Hashimoto-san?” Gar asked.

“I am old,” he said with a sigh. “Die soon. I am ashamed of what army has done to Nippon. Officers all crazy. They beat, sometimes kill soldiers for no reason. Soldiers very afraid. Officers carry swords, think they are samurai. Soldier makes mistake, officer cut off soldier’s hand. This war destroy my country. I am ashamed. Angry. I will make revenge. Maybe get caught. Die then.”

“Still have that thing?”

“I do,” he said proudly. “The secret thing. Wait for paper rain, then go to Hiroshima City. Put it in gardens of Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. Then wait to see what happens.”

“Is there a prisoner of war camp near here?”

“On Kyushu, there is big one. Many gaijin held there. Smaller one here, near Hiroshima City. We hear very bad stories in Hiroshima City. Many prisoners are slaves in the Kawasaki coal mine near Nagasaki. Many die.”

“Has Hiroshima been bombed?”

“No. Radio Tokyo say no cities bombed, but we know that is not true. Railroad men come from the north, tell different story. No wanna go back.”

“Okay,” Gar said. “I think what we have to do is let me be captured again. Go out on the boat. Put me back in that hole, then come back in. You tell the army you found me floating on a box.”

“They kill you.”

“They will see I wear khaki. They will question me first. I will tell them who I am. They will think I am a valuable prisoner. That way they won’t hurt you or your village.”

Hashimoto considered that rationale. Gar sure as hell didn’t want to be recaptured, but he also didn’t want to bring death and destruction down on this little fishing village just because one of them had fished him out of the sea. He was pretty sure Hashimoto understood. He told Gar that it would be better if he stayed right here during the day tomorrow. He would then pretend to find Gar after dark while making a final inspection of the boat for the next day’s fishing trip. He would call the guards at the nearest crossroads. He would get the villagers to act excited over his big discovery. After that, he would wait for paper rain and do what he’d promised to do.

Gar considered trying to escape to sea. Perhaps steal a fishing boat at night and sail it through the minefields to the open ocean — but even if he escaped the Seto, then what? No food, no water, and 1,500 miles to the nearest American base. There’d be a high probability of being intercepted by Jap patrol boats, and then the village would still catch hell. It was obviously crucial to somebody important back in Pearl that Hashimoto did whatever the hell he was supposed to do with that thing. In turn, Hashimoto’s chances were dependent on the village remaining on his side. Escape simply wasn’t feasible, so he reluctantly agreed to what Hashimoto was proposing.

“One last thing, Hashimoto-san,” Gar said. “Remember, put the secret thing where they told you, but don’t stay there.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Admiral Lockwood and Captain Forrester were discussing the planned move of the SubPac headquarters out to Guam when a messenger came in from the operations center.

“Op-immediate traffic, Admiral,” he said, handing a message to Lockwood.

“Who’s it from?” Forrester asked as Lockwood read the message.

“Archer-fish,” the messenger said, and then he left the office.

“Who is claiming to have hit a carrier with six fish,” Lockwood said. “Only to have the damned thing sail over the horizon as if nothing happened.”

“That doesn’t sound like Joe Enright,” Forrester said. “If anything, he’s too conservative with his reporting. And where’d they find a carrier?”

“Says it was an unidentified class, but definitely a flattop. Appeared to be very large, bigger than the Shokaku. He chased it for six hours and then got a shot. The thing never slowed down. Six steamers, and it kept going?”

“Bigger than Shokaku,” Forrester said. “I wonder.”

“The thing Gar Hammond went after? You’re thinking they got her to sea?”

“It’s possible. Hammond reported attacking the dry-dock caisson, but not the actual ship. That might have spooked the Japs to get her out of the Inland Sea and up to Yokohama or even Yokosuka. Somewhere that our boats couldn’t go.”

Lockwood put the message down. “They probably thought that the Inland Sea was somewhere our boats couldn’t go.”

Forrester shrugged. “We’ll have to wait for ULTRA, see if there’s chatter about losing a carrier.”

“That’s assuming we’re still getting real traffic intercepts,” Lockwood said. “After, well, you know.”

Forrester nodded. “Gar Hammond giveth, and Gar Hammond taketh away,” he said quietly.

By nine the next evening Gar was riding in the back of an army truck, arms bound, blindfolded, and escorted by two soldiers who’d looked like they were about twelve. Their rifles, with bayonets fixed, looked older and even taller than they were. The army officer who’d come to the village could barely contain his glee. He celebrated his accomplishment by whacking Gar across both shins with a baton, which brought Gar to his knees with what felt like two broken legs. Apparently he had been supposed to kneel the moment he saw the officer approaching. He knew that the longer he sat on that bench in the back of the truck, the harder it was going to be for him to get up and get out.

One of the village women had brought Gar a last meal and more fresh water. He had no idea of what he was eating, but he was still pretty hungry, and he knew that food was going to be in short supply wherever he was going. More than once he wondered if he’d made the right decision not to at least try to escape, but the reality was undeniable. If he got caught and was made to tell where he’d been, there would be a firing squad for the entire village, whose only crime had been to look the other way when a certain old man suddenly reappeared in their midst, acting as if he’d been there all along.

They drove for at least an hour, stopping at what sounded like several checkpoints along the way. Gar listened to much hissing and muttering at each stop. The officer who’d taken him into custody had come along for the ride to headquarters, or wherever they were going. When they finally stopped and shut down, Gar heard the canvas back of the truck pulled aside and then a lot of shouting in Japanese. He knew what they wanted, but he really couldn’t move. His legs hurt like hell, and he was still blindfolded. Then he felt two sharp blades prodding him in the side and heard more shouting. He fell sideways, toward the back of the truck, rolled once, and then fell off the truck and onto the ground. Someone helpfully kicked him to his feet and prodded him in the direction they wanted him to go. When the blindfold finally came off he was in a cell of some kind, very small, with a single metal chair in the middle and nothing else. They prodded him into the chair, removed the ropes, and slammed the metal door. Gar actually appreciated being left alone for a few minutes while he massaged his burning arms and tried to stop the bleeding cuts in his side.

That lasted for five minutes, and then the door opened to reveal a middle-aged man in a civilian suit. He was carrying a metal folding chair. He was maybe five-six and had dark hair with graying temples and the face of a parish priest: a kind, calm, welcoming expression, and a look in his eyes that said, Relax, nobody’s going to hurt you, we’re all going to be friends. The two child-guards outside looked on with interest and bowed deeply as the older man stepped in and set up his chair. Then the new arrival produced a small black semiautomatic pistol. He checked to see that there was brass showing at the slide and then pressed it into Gar’s forehead.

“Quickly, now,” he said. “Name, rank, and serial number.”

Gar made the required recitation.

“Commander,” he said. “Did you say commander?”

“I did.”

He withdrew the pistol. “Commander of what?”

“That is my rank. Commander, U.S. Navy.”

“Commander of what ship?”

Gar recited his rank and serial number.

The Priest, as Gar visualized him, stared at Gar for a long moment. His expression never changed. A sweet man, a kind man. Never hurt a flea.

“Commander of what ship, please?” His English was unaccented. Not prease, please.

Gar again recited his name, rank, and serial number, trying to maintain the pretense that the Japanese respected the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs, the one they’d never signed.

Gar’s interrogator put the gun back into his jacket pocket and turned his head slightly. He nodded to one of the guards, who opened the cell door wide. Outside in the hallway an extremely gaunt and sick-looking Caucasian was kneeling on the concrete floor. His clothes were in tatters, and his eyes were swollen closed. Another, much older guard stood behind him with his own hands behind his back. The Priest said one word in Japanese, and the guard produced a pistol and shot the prisoner in the back of the head. He dropped to the floor without a sound and began to bleed copiously onto the concrete floor. The guard made a sound of disgust and shot him again. The two kids in uniform looked nauseated.

Nobody moved. A ribbon of blood had reached the drain in the floor outside and began to trickle audibly down into it. That was the only sound. The air stank of gunpowder.

“Commander of what ship, please?” Same placid expression. I’ve got all night and the world’s supply of prisoners.

Gar heard the sounds of a metal door opening and someone else being dragged into the corridor outside his cell. Guards muttering in Japanese, grunting and pulling, and a third voice whimpering, “No, no, please,” in English. A third guard dragged the dead prisoner out of Gar’s sight, and a new one was forced to kneel in the mess on the floor. The guard with the pistol looked over at the Priest, waiting for the sign. The interrogator sat back, lit a cigarette, spit out a fleck of wet tobacco, and gave Gar a moment to consider his circumstances. So he did.

He was a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army, who, these days anyway, were the absolute masters of the ancient kingdom of Dai Nippon. The Japanese were a race of men who were the masters of the delicately intricate tea ceremony, the precision and discipline of Zen rock and sand gardens, single-stroke calligraphy, and the arrangement of fresh cherry blossoms. They lived in wooden houses with parchment windows, and they slept on flat mats with no heat in the winter. These same men were also the masters of the exquisite samurai sword and the perpetrators of the rape of Nanjing in 1937, where they used live Chinese civilians for recruit bayonet practice. They were the architects of the hell ship system, transporting POWs captured in Southeast Asia in the holds of merchant ships with the hatches bolted shut for the entire two-week journey to the copper mines of Honshu. If the ship happened to be torpedoed along the way, the Japs went into the lifeboats and listened as the POWs tried in vain to open the hatches before the ship finally sank.

They were an alien race, so alien that Americans couldn’t even begin to appreciate how different the Japanese were in every respect. Death was supposed to mean nothing to them and everything to them. For any soldier, death in battle was the sublime objective. Death in captivity was the greatest dishonor they could imagine. Prisoners of war were therefore walking bags of offensive protoplasm, nothing more. POWs forfeited their humanity and all respect when they first raised their hands. Gar knew this Kempeitai officer would pull prisoners out of their cells and shoot every damned one of them until Gar decided to answer his question, and he’d do it without as much thought as he’d put into flicking that piece of wet tobacco off his lips.

Okay, he thought, I get the picture.

The only important thing that he knew and they apparently didn’t was the immutable certainty that Japan was going to lose this war. There were forces assembling 8,000 miles away that were going to purge the earth of this bizarre race. There were half a million troops being trained for one mission and one mission only: to invade this tiny island country and kill every goddamned Japanese man, woman, and child who stood up in front of them without waving a white flag, which really meant they were going to have to kill them all.

He decided at that moment to answer any and all of this man’s questions, because nothing that he learned from Gar would change what was coming.

“I was the commanding officer of the USS Dragonfish, an American submarine,” he said.

The interrogator nodded pleasantly. Then he swung around in his chair and signaled for the guards to take the second prisoner away. Or so Gar thought. They grabbed the prisoner and pushed him down the corridor. As Gar sat back in his chair, relieved that he hadn’t caused the death of another prisoner, two shots rang out, followed by laughter and shouts of fake annoyance at another mess in the hallway.

The interrogator looked at him as if to note his reaction, that infuriating smile still on his face. “Tomorrow,” he said. “We will talk some more tomorrow. No. You will talk some more tomorrow.”

He rose, folded up his chair, and left the cell. The two young guards, still looking unsettled at the murder of the two prisoners, were being handed wet mops as Gar’s cell door was slammed shut.

The next morning they brought Gar a metal pitcher of water, a tin cup of tea, and some rice cakes. He was stiff and achy after a cold night curled up in a corner on the concrete floor. His shins had big red goose eggs on them, and he was very careful not to let anything touch them.

It wasn’t much of a cell. A hole in the floor in the opposite corner served as the latrine. There was a single, foot-square window high up on the wall, which appeared to be open to the outside air. Twice during the night he’d heard locomotives huffing by the building, followed by the rattle of boxcars and squealing wheels. He’d also heard metal doors being opened and slammed shut throughout the night and wondered if this was some kind of transit station for POWs.

When the food came, one guard pointed a bayonet at him while the other deposited the pitcher, the tin cup, and the tiny wooden box on the chair. Then they withdrew, slamming the door as if trying to break it. Gar used a little bit of the water to wash his hands and face and then ate the food quickly, standing by the chair. He tried to warm his hands with the cup of tea before drinking some. It was very weak, and there were tiny stem fragments in the bottom. When he’d finished, he put the cup in the food box and put the box by the door. Then he sat down in the chair, facing the metal door, and waited. He stank of fish, mud, and general filth; in a land where they would have preferred to bathe hourly, he must have been a towering olfactory disturbance.

He awoke to the sound of keys in the door. He’d fallen back asleep without even realizing it. The door opened, and two different guards stepped in. These were not high school kids, Gar thought. These guys looked like battle-hardened infantry troops. They were not even armed. They motioned for him to stand up, and he did so, swaying a little on his badly bruised shins. One of them dropped a noose of rope around his neck, tightened it, and led him out of the cell. The other followed, leaving the cell door open. They went to the right, away from the scene of the butchery the evening before. At the end of the corridor they went outside into bright, gray light. They were walking across what looked like an army parade ground, surrounded by brick buildings of different sizes. Some were obviously barracks, the others offices or warehouses. A rail line ran behind the row of buildings on the end, not more than 100 yards from his cell house.

They walked across the parade ground, one guard in front, one behind, and Gar in the middle with his neck rope. He had the sense that if he had tripped and fallen, the guard in the lead would not have noticed. They went into one of the office buildings and up a flight of wooden stairs. So far, Gar had seen no one other than his two guards. The parade ground was deserted, and many of the buildings also looked empty. They took him to a room that held a long green-felt-covered table surrounded by several armchairs, with Japanese national and regimental flags mounted in one corner. Three water pitchers with glasses had been placed in front of the chairs on one side of the table. The guards nodded at one of the chairs on the opposite side of the table, and Gar sat down. The guard did not remove the noose. He dropped the other end of the rope on the floor, and then the two of them stepped behind him and went to parade rest. One of them made a quiet noise of disgust as he caught Gar’s aroma; the other grunted agreement, and then they each took one step back. Gar tried to act unconcerned and closed his eyes. He had high hopes for a civilized interrogation; this didn’t look like a place where they shot people on the carpet. On the other hand, he was sitting there with a hangman’s noose around his neck.

He was just about to doze off again when a door behind him opened and he heard low voices. He’d learned by then not to look around or do anything without being told, so he just sat there. Two Japanese officers in greenish uniforms came in and went around to the other side of the table. Each carried a notebook and wore a holstered pistol. Accompanying them was his interrogator from the night before, dressed in an army uniform and still smiling as if he hadn’t murdered any prisoners in at least, oh, eight hours. The naval officers sat down, and the one he’d been mentally calling the Priest cleared his throat and then rattled away in Japanese for a few minutes. Gar couldn’t tell if he was in charge or just a briefer here. One of the naval officers looked to be much older and carried himself with the gravitas of a senior officer. The other one was paying close attention to the Priest, while the older one seemed a bit disinterested. Then Gar realized that the Priest was speaking to him.

“Tell us how you came to be here today,” he instructed. Gar proceeded to do so, while the Priest did a simultaneous translation into Japanese. He told them about ordering the boat to dive without him, then being captured by the minesweepers and taken to Kure and eventually the Shinano. When he said the word Shinano the older officer came awake. He asked a question in a voice that sounded like he regularly gargled with sandpaper.

“He wants to know how you can know that name,” the Priest said. “That name is a great secret.”

“It was our mission to penetrate the minefields of Bungo Suido and sink that ship,” Gar said. “Instead we had to attack her in dry dock. Later, after I was captured, I was aboard Shinano when she was torpedoed and sunk.”

The Priest blinked and then gave him a long stare. The Captain, which is what Gar had decided to call the obviously senior officer, barked something.

“Think carefully,” the Priest said. “No one here at this compound knows anything about a sinking. For your information, that is the official government line.”

“You mean, Shinano wasn’t sunk?”

“That ship was attacked at sea but shrugged off all attacks and has gone on to Yokosuka. Everyone knows that.”

“What do you want me to say, then?” Gar asked. “Just so you know, I was the one who fired torpedoes at two destroyers, two ammunition barges, and then the dry-dock caisson wall at Kure. Once I was captured in the Hoyo Strait, a Kempeitai officer took me aboard the carrier for transport to Tokyo. The captain of the ship, Captain Abe, made me stand on the bridge so that I could see for myself that she was invulnerable. I was on the bridge when the four torpedoes hit, and an hour or so later I watched her sink, stern first, and take probably more than two thousand men with her.”

The Priest hissed in annoyance and then spoke to the Captain, who had picked up on the name Abe. When the Priest was finished translating, the Captain spat out something that sounded to Gar a lot like the Japanese equivalent to “bullshit.” The other naval officer looked very apprehensive, as if he shouldn’t be hearing any of this. Then the Captain surprised him and spoke in English.

“Name of Kempeitai officer?”

“Yamashita,” Gar said.

The Captain grunted and then said something in Japanese to the Priest, who hesitated and then replied. Whatever he said made the Captain look truly surprised.

“Why do you agree to talk to us?” the Captain asked.

“Because whatever you learn from me does not matter.”

The Captain thought that one over. “Tell me something important. Something I do not know.”

“Our submarines can penetrate your minefields because we can see the mines,” Gar said.

“That is lie,” the Captain scoffed.

“We came through Bungo Suido. Is it not mined?”

“You had chart. Someone betrayed us.”

“Didn’t need a chart,” Gar said. “We can see the mines.”

“How is this possible?”

“Sonar,” Gar said.

“More stupid lies.”

“Did a submarine fire torpedoes into the caisson where Shinano was berthed? Sink two destroyers? Explode the ammunition barges?”

More sucking in of air all around. The Priest had to translate some of the words.

“You are spy,” the Captain concluded. “You have heard these things in one of the villages. In Kure, or Hiroshima City. None of this is true.”

Gar sat back in his chair. If the Captain was going to label him a spy, he was a dead man.

“Have you been to Kure recently?” Gar asked. “Make a phone call. Tell them you wish to come down there and inspect the waterfront. See what they say.”

The Priest had to translate again. The Captain glared at Gar for a moment, banged his palm down on the table, nodded, got up, and left the room. The other officer spoke up once the Captain was gone. He, too, had English.

“You must be much more careful,” he said. “Whether or not the things you say are true, they are not permitted to be spoken, do you understand? Listen to the major.”

Gar wasn’t having it. “I understand,” he said, “that the General Imperial Staff or whatever you call it is deluding itself. Shinano has been destroyed. The Kure naval base waterfront is a mess. The submarine that was waiting for Shinano was one of many. If you intend to kill me because I speak the truth, then I can’t help that. But that won’t change the truth.”

The officer had no reply to that. Gar asked them how it was that they all were able to speak English. The Priest, whom he now knew was a major, smiled. “I am Kempeitai, foreign espionage division. These officers are naval intelligence. Of course we can speak English. Do all your naval intelligence officers not speak Japanese?”

The real answer to that was no — none that he had ever met, anyway. He shook his head.

“Then how can they ever catch Japanese spies?” he asked.

“They don’t try,” Gar said.

“Explain.”

“If we think someone is a Japanese spy, we leave him alone. We let him report on the true situation. That there are now so many American warships there is not room for them all to anchor in one harbor. That new ships arrive every week. That large American airfields are being built on Guam and Tinian. That two American armies have invaded the Philippines. That—”

“Enough!” the Priest said. “This is propaganda.”

At that moment a siren began wailing, and then a second one, more distant. The Priest made a face.

“B-29?” Gar asked.

The Priest shrugged, then nodded.

“This doesn’t happen in America,” Gar pointed out.

At that moment the Captain came back into the room and let fly with a torrent of rapid-fire Japanese. He seemed angrier with them than afraid of any impending air raid, if that’s what it was. More sirens were going off now, and Gar could hear people stirring out in the hallway. The two guards stepped back into the room. One came up and removed the noose.

The major stood up, his face no longer quite so genial.

“You go now. Go with them. Keep silent!”

Gar turned around and followed one guard out the door while the other one fell in behind him. They didn’t put the noose back on this time, and everyone seemed to be in just a bit of a hurry. They took him back outside and toward his cell house. What Gar had thought to be unoccupied office buildings were emptying out onto the parade field. It looked like the men were all falling into some kind of formation. He would have thought they’d be heading for bomb shelters, but it was apparent they had defiance on their minds. Gar listened for the rumble of a bomber formation but heard none, and there was nothing visible in that cold gray sky as they went into the cell house. They marched him right back into his cell, where the guard obligingly threw in the noose, in case Gar might yet change his mind and do the honorable thing. Then the door was slammed.

TWENTY-FIVE

After an hour or so the sirens went off again, sounding a steady tone for the all clear. Gar never did hear any airplanes. They brought some food and water toward evening, and a wet towel, which allowed him to wash off some of the accumulated filth. Sometime after that he heard a commotion out in the corridor. It sounded like all the cells were being opened up, and then his door opened and he was yanked out into a line of prisoners in the corridor. The man ahead of him was wearing a hood, and a short rope hung down to his waist from underneath it. One guard bound Gar’s hands loosely with manila line and indicated that Gar should grab that man’s rope. Then Gar’s own noose, followed by a hood, was pulled down over Gar’s head. A moment later, the man behind him took hold of his trailing rope. When the man ahead of him started walking, Gar followed suit to keep from choking him. Fortunately the man behind him also understood the game.

They were poked and prodded down the corridor and then outside, where rough hands kept them tripping down a set of stairs. Then more trudging, probably across that parade ground, until he heard the distinctive sounds of a steam locomotive idling somewhere ahead of them. They encountered a wooden ramp, where hands at the top guided them to the back walls of a boxcar and pushed them down into a seated position. Gar ended up in a corner, with another POW on his right. One of the guards shouted a series of commands, and then big doors rolled shut. Twenty minutes or so later, the steam engine started up with a jerk, and they were off, destination anybody’s guess.

“Who are you?” the man on his right asked. Gar told him. The other man said he was army air force, Major Jimmy Franklin, pilot of a B-29 recce bird that had been taken down over Kyushu. He had a mild southern accent.

“I thought you guys flew so high they couldn’t get at you,” Gar said.

“We thought so, too,” he said. “We were at thirty-five thousand feet, but they’ve got a new tactic. Guy gets in a fighter plane, on oxygen, we think, and flies out ahead and above us. They’ve done something to the engine, because at the last minute he inverts and then flies right into us. Took our left wing right off. Copilot and I got out; another fighter strafed him in his chute, missed me, and here I am, lucky fucking me. We’re going to Tokyo, apparently.”

“Why Tokyo?”

“We were briefed back at home base that senior officers are taken to Tokyo so the expert interrogators get a shot at them. You were a CO, so it’s even more likely you’re going.”

Gar told him about his sessions with the Kempeitai and the naval intelligence types.

“You went beyond name, rank, and serial number?” Franklin asked. “You talked to them?”

He seemed genuinely surprised, even disapproving, so Gar explained his reasoning. “The Japanese here in Japan apparently have no idea of how bad the war’s gone for them. I thought, hell, tell ’em, with a generous measure of bullshit, of course, and maybe open their eyes to the fact that they can’t win. Maybe they’ll give up. Plus that guy was going to shoot more prisoners until I gave him something.”

A whiff of acrid coal smoke blew through the boxcar, making everyone cough. Having been around coal, Gar knew damned well that wasn’t quality fuel they were burning.

“Yella bastards’ll never give up,” Franklin said. “We’re gonna have to bomb ’em back to the Stone Age, and then invade. I’m not gonna give ’em shit, no matter what they do.”

Gar was about to say that he might be wrong about that, having watched the Priest casually murder two POWs as an inspiration for him to talk.

“Is it true you can’t really bomb Japan from China?” Gar asked.

“We can and we can’t. No escorts can make it that far and back, so we go high. Half the time we can’t see shit on the ground, but we have to drop our loads in order to be light enough to get back. Photo interpreters are sayin’ we’re not doing significant damage. The scuttlebutt is that we’re all goin’ to Tinian pretty soon. Then we’ll get P-51s to come along. You really tell ’em how many subs are sitting offshore?”

“May have embellished it a bit, but, yes, I did. First time I was captured. That’s why I ended up on that carrier — they were going to show me how invincible she was.”

”What do you know about B-29s?”

“Big, go a long way, carry lotsa bombs. That’s about it.”

“Good,” Franklin said. “Stick with that.”

They stopped talking after that. Gar had the clear impression Franklin thought he was some kind of traitor for talking to the Japanese intelligence officers, but he still thought it didn’t matter what they knew. If there were ten subs or even twenty operating off the Home Islands, the point was that they couldn’t leave port without being hunted by an entire pack of submarines. The U.S. Navy’s submarine noose was tightening every day. Eventually they’d quit leaving port, and it would be all over.

The train went around a long, squealing curve. That changed the relative wind, and soon they were all sucking coal smoke again. The hood actually helped. He finally fell asleep.

The train’s whistle shrieking into the morning air woke everyone up. They were creeping along the tracks, the regular banging of the wheels on the track seams keeping noisy time. Gar thought he could smell the sea between occasional puffs of coal smoke. Then the air brakes clamped down and they shuddered to a stop. The doors rolled open, and there was the usual shouting in Japanese. When Gar felt his neighbor getting yanked to his feet he got ready to stand up, but nothing happened. He could feel and hear the rest of the prisoners being taken out of the boxcar. For a moment he wondered if he was being taken somewhere else, or for one of those one-way rides out to a swamp somewhere. Then he heard a familiar voice. It was the Priest.

“We go now,” he said.

He stumbled getting up, his knees locking up after a long cold night on the boxcar’s wooden floor. The major steadied him and then tugged on the neck rope. Gar followed, still hooded, and with his hands still bound in front of him by a short hank of manila. They went down the ramp, along what Gar assumed was the platform of a train station, and then into a building. The hood and rope came off once inside, and he was led to a small office in what looked like a train station. Outside he could see the column of hooded prisoners he’d been traveling with. The Priest sat him down in a wooden chair, told him to sit still, and then left the room. He came back with two cups of tea and handed one to Gar. By holding it with both hands he was able to get it to his lips. It was warm and had leaves in it, not stems. It was midafternoon, based on the sunlight.

“Not going to Tokyo?” Gar asked.

The major smiled at him, looking more than ever like a congenial rector at some parish church.

“Yes, we are. I will present you to Kempeitai senior interrogation staff. You have been cooperative, and you will be treated well. They are most interested in talking to you.”

“What about them?” Gar asked, indicating the rest of the POWs.

“They are going to Tokyo as well, but they are going in coastal freighter. You will be traveling on destroyer.”

Gar thought about that. Maybe some of his “mere propaganda” had gotten through. A coastal freighter, even if she stayed well inside, literally hugging the coast, was still going to be living dangerously. With the dearth of targets, the boats had been coming closer and closer inshore, looking for a score. A transiting destroyer, on the other hand, could go really fast, and thereby make it almost impossible for a boat to get set up for a killing shot. From Hiroshima City to Tokyo Bay wouldn’t take very long, and any sub spotting a destroyer going fast would assume there was something bigger in the offing right behind her.

“My own personal destroyer?”

He laughed. “No, Commander. This destroyer is going to Tokyo for far more important reasons. It happens to be the quickest method to get you there, that’s all.”

“And what will happen then?”

“That will depend on you, Commander. The things they want to know from you will be details about your submarines. You boasted that you can see mines underwater. They will want to know how you can do that.”

“Why?” Gar asked.

“Why?” the Priest exclaimed. “Is that not obvious?”

“No, it’s not. Japan is a collection of islands. You are using minefields as defensive measures. That makes perfect sense. If we know there is an enemy minefield ahead, we try to go around it, if possible, or we simply don’t go there. If I could tell you exactly how this sonar works, what could you do about it? The answer is, nothing.”

The priest thought about that for a moment, struggling for a reply.

“There’s more,” Gar said. “The most important things about a submarine are its teeth, yes? Its torpedoes. That’s what you worry about. And yet it is us who want to copy your torpedoes, because they are the best in the world.”

“We would arrange the mines in a different manner, perhaps,” he said. “To confuse your sonar.”

Gar shook his head. “Mines are mines. They are buoyant metal spheres. Filled with explosives and air. They are held between the bottom and the surface by mooring chains, so that they lurk at a prescribed depth from the surface. That’s how they work, they just wait. If a ship or a submarine touches one, boom. That’s all there is to it. You cannot make them invisible. It doesn’t matter if you rearrange them — we can still see them.”

“If we know the details of the sonar, we can perhaps jam it.”

“Sorry, but you can’t jam a sonar, except by using loud, explosive noises, and then your own sonars go blind as well. That is the point I’ve been trying to make all along here, Major. Japan is out of options. That carrier should have had fifteen destroyers around it. It had four. That tells the whole story, and that’s why I’ve agreed to talk to your interrogators. They will absolutely hate what I have to say.”

“You talk as if war is over.”

“I think it is. Oh, not actually, not right now. Men will still die. Ships will still be sunk — perhaps like this destroyer we’re going to ride. Cities will be bombed. More U.S. Marines will die on the beaches, and more Japanese soldiers will die in their caves. But on the grand scale, this war is as good as over. The Nazis have their backs to the wall in Berlin on not one but two fronts. We are all waiting for Japan to realize that she, too, will soon be surrounded and just stop.”

“We will fight forever,” the Priest declared. “We will never surrender. We will fight to last citizen. And if you come with your marines and your ships to invade these islands, everyone, old men, boys, women, everyone, will fight you to the death.”

“We don’t actually have to invade you, Major,” Gar said softly. “Your people are beginning to starve now, and we’re not even here, are we? But our machines are here. That’s how this will end, Major. The Japanese people will indeed fight to the death — against machines. Against American technology.”

He shook his head in frustration. “I must not talk to you. You make me crazy!”

“I apologize, Major. If someone asks me a question, I tell them what I believe is the truth.”

“If you say such things in Tokyo, they will beat you to pieces.”

“For telling them the truth?”

“For having no honor!” he shouted.

Gar didn’t know what to say to that, so he just thanked him for the tea. The major stomped out of the office, slamming the door. Gar closed his eyes. It was probably the last decent food or drink he was going to see for a while. Outside, the line of POWs had had their hoods taken off. Gar could see the air force major staring in at him through the window, an accusatory expression on his face. Gar didn’t have to wonder much about what the major was thinking.

He could see now that his little crusade was not going to work. The Japanese weren’t interested in the truth of their circumstances. They were only interested in maintaining the fiction that they were all samurai, devoted acolytes to the mystical Bushido code, and their warped sense of honor was not just everything to them — it was the only thing. They had to know that most of what had been their huge fleet was now being crushed in the black ocean depths of the Pacific. As for Gar, he was warm and nobody was whaling on him, for the moment, anyway. One hour at a time.

TWENTY-SIX

Two of those hours later they were driving through the perimeter gates of the Kure naval arsenal. The Kempeitai major and Gar sat in the back of a strange-looking black sedan with an enlisted driver and one guard up front. Gar was no longer hooded or handcuffed. He was sure they’d figured out that he would recognize the hopelessness of any escape attempt. How long would one khaki-clad, white-faced round-eye last in the Japanese countryside, where the locals were already butchering any fliers who managed to bail out of their B-29s?

Kure by day looked a lot like any U.S. naval shipyard or base. Sooty industrial buildings, giant yard cranes grinding along the narrow, cobblestoned streets, smokestacks streaming coal smoke, bright rail tracks in all the streets, and a throng of workers everywhere, wearing dirty uniforms and carrying canvas bags full of tools, parts, pipe, wiring or valves, or pulling welding gas cylinders on handcarts that looked like they’d been there from the days of sail. The car crawled through all the activity with the driver hitting a screechy horn every few seconds and the workers ignoring him with profound disinterest. When they got down to the waterfront, there were more cranes and small trucks tending to one large warship, a heavy cruiser whose entire bow was missing. She was parked inside a flooded dry dock, and Gar wondered if that was the dock he’d torpedoed. She was well inside the dock, her front end enveloped in a fountain of welding sparks. There were three destroyers nested alongside each other at the caisson end, but tellingly, there was no caisson. It was a dock, but no longer a dry dock.

Across the harbor was Etajima Island. The buildings of the Japanese Naval Academy shone dully in the waning winter sunlight. Out in the harbor was a large black battleship, riding to a buoy, her top hampers looking like the towers of a feudal castle. Gar had always hoped to see one — through his periscope. They drove down the sidewalls of the dock, passing underneath the big yard cranes that went rumbling by, their warning bells clanging a lookout for pedestrians and vehicles alike. There were clear signs of the Dragon’s attack around the shipyard. There were craters in the streets, hurriedly filled in with sand, and holes in the window walls of the shops. One large yard crane had been burned out, and many piles of debris had been pushed up into corners.

They stopped at the nest of destroyers, where petty officers on the quarterdeck watched warily, waiting to see if there was going to be some ritual ceremony required for the new arrivals. The driver got out and opened the door for the major. The guard did the same for Gar, but with a lot less courtesy. As he was hauled out he heard a noise rising above the industrial hum of the metal shops, cranes, and power plants. It was a dull rumble of engines, and suddenly everyone, the crewmen on the destroyers, the shipyard workers, the guard and driver, and the major, was staring skyward. Gar looked up, too, and saw a complex pattern of contrails in the sky, turning light pink as the sun began to set. There appeared to be hundreds of them being generated by invisible sources against the darkening eastern sky. They were all headed in the direction of the Kure arsenal. Then the sirens started wailing. That’s when Gar found out how many people were working at the arsenal, because the streets suddenly filled with shipyard workers, all running for the concrete Quonset-hut-shaped shelters located between the larger buildings. The major, in defiant contrast, folded his arms and sat down on a mooring bollard, obviously unafraid and ostensibly prepared to watch the show.

The three destroyers went to General Quarters as soon as the sirens sounded. Gar didn’t know what to do. His guard looked like he really wanted to head for one of those shelters, but the major’s nonchalant pose made that impossible. A large bang startled all three of them as the outboard destroyer let fly from its forward 5-inch mount. Gar was impressed at how fast they’d gone into action. The middle destroyer in the nest soon joined in, and Gar had to put fingers in his ears as the guns blammed away, pointing high, but probably not high enough, at the front of the advancing contrails. Gar could barely see black shell bursts high in the sky after thirty seconds or so, and finally the inboard destroyer went to work. Then came a mighty boom from out in the harbor. Gar turned around to see the battleship’s main guns trained skyward and belching huge gouts of fire and smoke across the harbor. He knew battleship guns could throw 1-ton shells 20 miles, but he didn’t know if that translated directly into altitude.

The contrails covered most of the sky as the bombers passed overhead, and for a moment Gar thought they were bound for Hiroshima and not bothering with Kure. He was wrong about that. The leading edge of the contrails had gone well past Kure when the first 1,000-pounders began to land about a mile east of them. He would have thought that a mile would make a difference, but the advancing wall of blast and fire erupting across the visible horizon was already shaking the concrete under his feet. The major didn’t look so confident now, and Gar saw that their guard was no longer with them.

The major was visibly torn. Bushido required him to stand unafraid and wholly unimpressed. The next stick of bombs landed somewhat closer, and his best efforts were faltering badly. Apparently, the B-29s, for that’s what these planes had to be, dropped their entire load in less than a few seconds, and thus the bombs landed, all twenty of them, in less than a few seconds, pulverizing everything within 500 feet of the impact point. Gar noticed a steel ladder that led down to the water from the pier level in the flooded dry dock. It had a steel cage over it for safety. It probably went all the way to the bottom of the dry dock, which is where he would have preferred to be just then except that it was flooded with 42 feet of water. Still, standing out in the open on the pier was no longer an option. Gar ran for it, sure that the major was shouting something at him, but he no longer cared. He hopped out onto the ladder and climbed down to the water, where he quickly submerged himself right up to his chin, leaned back against the cage, and closed his eyes.

By now the bombs were drowning out the sustained fire of the nested destroyers. Gar could no longer see where they were landing, but his head and ears were buffeted by blast waves as hundreds of large bombs fell into and all around the Kure arsenal. He finally ducked underwater when the pressure on his ears and face became too much.

He’d never felt so utterly helpless in his life. Even depth charges, whose terror he had barely come to master, were nothing compared to this unending, overwhelming, ear-crushing, chest-constricting, and utterly relentless barrage. It wasn’t like the movies, where a few bombs went off and everyone was afraid. This was an eternity of stupendous, hammering power, with each God-like pulse seemingly aimed right at him.

He finally had to pop to the surface to breathe, then wished he hadn’t. For the two seconds he pushed his face above the surface, the shock waves from the bombs burned the skin on his forehead and squeezed the fillings in his teeth. When he went back down he went way down, pushing himself on the rungs of that ladder to get deeper, as the flash-flash-flash-flash of the exploding bombs lit up the water in the dry dock with a continuous dull red glare. Gar felt a sudden compression in the water and heard an incredibly loud clanging noise, and then his face was whipped sideways by a shock wave. Only the cage kept him from being wiped off the ladder. He’d been holding his breath and was now out of air. He scrambled back up, his lungs bursting, and then the whole ladder was ripped off the concrete wall as another bomb went off. He’d been squeezing his eyes shut the whole time, but when he opened them he saw the propellers and rudders of the inboard, pier-side destroyer lurching toward him, and forward of that a dissolving red and white fireball under the water that boiled outward and upward, lancing his eardrums and flattening the skin of his face against his teeth as she blew up.

The cage that had been keeping him on the ladder now became a deathtrap. His hands felt like they were welded to the railings until he finally realized that he was going deep into the flooded dry dock as the steel ladder, its pins blasted off, sank like a stone toward the floor.

He let go and pumped his arms and feet inside the cage, desperate for air, his vision turning red and his lungs screaming into his bleeding ears until he finally burst onto the surface, just in time to see the stern of that destroyer pointing skyward right over his head as her back half went down, her shattered hull glistening obscenely against a backdrop of the towering, glowing cloud of a magazine explosion farther forward. The other two destroyers had been shoved sideways out into the middle of the dry dock, their superstructures dismasted and deformed, and dozens of bodies were draped over their decks and lifelines. There was fuel oil everywhere, but fortunately it had not yet caught fire.

Gar was treading water and trying to breathe. The ladder was gone, and he was barely able to scrabble along the concrete walls of the dry dock, trying hard to get away from the subsiding carcass of the obliterated destroyer. He felt blood on both sides of his neck and could hear nothing at all. Every breath he took hurt his ribs, and there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the air. His eyes felt as if they were hanging out on stalks, like some desperate crab. Large objects were still falling out of the sky and into the dock. For a moment, he wondered if he shouldn’t just let go and slip back underwater.

This was just too goddamned hard.

But — it had stopped. The incessant body-slamming concussions had stopped.

It was over.

His forehead bumped up against an iron ring mounted on the seawall. He grabbed it with both hands, settled back into the cold water, hanging at arm’s length, and closed his stinging eyes. His teeth hurt. His bones hurt. His hair hurt. His innards felt loose. His hands started to tremble, so he pushed one arm through the ring and just hung on by his elbow, which also hurt. He kept his face under the water, because it felt good.

It’s winter here in Dai Nippon, Gar remembered. Water’s cold. Cold enough to sting and hurt. Make you shiver uncontrollably. Then he realized that it wasn’t doing that. Instead it was growing warmer, not colder. He vaguely remembered shivering his teeth out, but that seemed to be a long time ago. Now, it didn’t matter so much. He was in the water and therefore safe from the apocalypse subsiding up above.

Hypothermia, his brain warned.

I know, I know, he told himself, but this is safer than being up there when they start coming out of their shelters and see what’s happened. He wondered if he wasn’t kidding himself. Which was going to be worse, he wondered: a crowd of hysterical shipyard workers seeing a round-eye climbing out of the dry dock, or what he would feel like when he actually saw the devastation wrought by his side, his air force, with just one bombing raid. Suddenly his old refrain, Remember Pearl Harbor, didn’t seem to justify what had just happened here. Or maybe it did. He should perhaps ask the three thousand guys who died at Pearl what that felt like. Talk to all those guys on the Arizona who sat up in their racks on a Sunday morning just in time to see all the powder stored in the forward magazines coming at them in a wall of flame that flattened every bulkhead in the ship from bow to stern.

One raid. The first of many, as he had told the major, and now he knew firsthand what it was like to be on the receiving end of American firepower. The Shinano experience had been a little bit detached. When the torpedoes went off, they felt them but didn’t truly experience them, not like, say, the carrier’s engineers, locked down in their main spaces, when those four fish tore the main steam lines out of the overhead and scalded them all to death. When that destroyer in the dry dock went up in Gar’s face, he got a firsthand taste of a ship kill, up close and much too personal.

You won’t be fighting us, he remembered saying, one-on-one, samurai knights getting off their horses, taking off their fantastical headdresses, unlimbering their gleaming, multihued katanas to challenge the champion of the other side for the glory of the field. You will instead be cowering in your shelters, if you have shelters. You will be trying not to shit yourself while unimaginable destruction rains down on everything you have ever known and loved, everything familiar to you, your family, your workplace, your home, your village, town, city, and all of it descending soundlessly from a stratospheric composition of pinkish ice-crystal contrails scribed across the skies of a winter’s evening, and not for a few minutes but for an eternity of overwhelming sound, pressure, heat, bone-rattling concussion, and the certain knowledge that you will never survive what is happening all around you.

Something small bounced off his head. He looked up.

The major was standing above him on the seawall. He appeared to be entirely unhinged. He was wobbling on unreliable legs with both hands clasping his bloody head. His uniform was shredded from top to bottom, and his body looked as if he’d been flogged. Blood trickled down from his eyes and ears. His mouth was moving while his hands clawed at his head and hair as if he were searching for lice. Behind him the naval base was simply ablaze. Huge clouds of smoke and dust pumped up into the lambent evening sky, the smoke illuminated from within by intense fires. The major finally fell to his knees and tried to steady himself with one trembling hand. The other hand produced a pistol. His eyes were so deformed Gar wondered if he could really see him, but he was obviously intent on shooting something. Somebody. Him.

Gar knew he should duck back underwater as the major raised that pistol, even as Gar saw that his injured arm was unable to control the gun. Gar was in such a state that he decided not to bother ducking. The major pointed the pistol in Gar’s general direction and began firing. Gar could feel but not hear the gun going off. He could see the bullets scribing bright white bubble trails into the water at odd angles. That seemed to be an important detail as this half-mad, bomb-shocked Japanese officer tried to kill him. Gar knew he should have been afraid, terrified, even. Instead, he realized that he sympathized with the deranged officer up above on the pier.

The major stopped shooting when he realized he hadn’t come anywhere near Gar with his wild gunfire. He looked to his right, where a small cluster of similarly stunned crewmen on the nearest destroyer — themselves still on their hands and knees, their faces bloody from concussion — were watching from the middle of the dock. Gar wasn’t sure they even saw him down in the water, littered as it was with floating debris and oil. The major opened his mouth and tried to say something, but only produced bloody froth. He was weeping, so frustrated and concussed that he probably didn’t even know he was crying. His mouth continued to move, and then he closed his eyes for a moment, bent over, and forcefully exhaled, seeming to shrink into himself. He then put the pistol into his mouth and fired one last time. His body dropped sideways into an awkward pile of bloody limbs and rags.

Gar stared for a second and then glanced left toward that destroyer. The men were standing now on her quarterdeck, some of them as blood-spattered as the major, at ragged attention and bowing deeply in respect for what the major had just done, apparently unaware that their ship was beginning to list to starboard.

They’re not human, Gar thought. They’re fucking monsters. They approve. Whatever are we going to do with these people?

TWENTY-SEVEN

Hours later he was back with the group of POWs at that tiny train station on the outskirts of Hiroshima City. He wasn’t entirely sure how he got there, and his mind was already blocking out the images of utter destruction at Kure. The other prisoners had been gathered into a waiting room surrounded by armed guards, and the atmosphere had changed significantly. Each of the guards looked ready and all too willing to impale the nearest prisoner on his bayonet. It was getting dark, so they could no longer see much outside, but the red glow on the horizon from the fires at Kure remained undiminished.

Gar was booted into the room by a guard. His clothes, already ragged, were still wet and spotted with oil and blood from his damaged ears. Two guys picked him up and gently pulled him into the room, away from the nearest guards, who were prowling the perimeter of the group as if looking for potential culls. The room was warm because of the crowd, and Gar was grateful for it. He sat down. His brain still wasn’t working well, not after the bombardment at Kure. He couldn’t figure out why he was still alive. After the major did himself in, Gar remembered, he’d wondered how long before one of the watchers on that destroyer got a rifle and did the job correctly. By that point he wouldn’t have minded.

The POWs slowly and surreptitiously pushed him all the way back into a corner of the waiting room. His traveling companion on the train, the army air force major, sat down next to him and asked what had happened. In halting words, Gar told him.

“They flatten the place?”

“Looked like it to me,” Gar said. Then he realized he’d heard what the other man had said. He felt his sticky ears. He was no longer deaf.

“Big raid, then?”

“The sky was full of contrails. Looked like hundreds. Probably not that many, but big enough. They were long past Kure when the bombs started to go off.”

Franklin nodded with satisfaction. “That means we’re operational from Tinian. You see fighters?”

Gar shook his head. “I saw the end of the world,” he said. “That was enough.”

“Good,” Franklin said. “About goddamned time. I saw you in that room with that Jap. Why were you getting special treatment?”

Gar told the major what had happened, and why.

“You’re special, then?” Franklin asked. “’Cause you’re willing to talk?”

“You’re all wrong about that,” Gar said. “That guy tried to kill me.”

“Well, what the fuck were you doing talking to them?”

“Like I said, I was trying to convince them they’ve already lost the war. That there was no longer any point to resisting. That the whole industrial might of the United States was about to roll over them and squash ’em flat. That’s what I was doing. Do it again, too. Because they are fucked. They just don’t know it yet.”

“Screw that noise,” Franklin said. “You don’t talk to the enemy. You never talk to the enemy. You do, you’re a fucking collaborator.”

“I guess you’re entitled to your opinion,” Gar said. “But collaborators help the enemy. When I tell ’em they’re gonna lose this war, that’s not helping.”

Franklin shook his head and turned his face away from Gar in disgust. After about ten minutes, Gar asked the guy on the other side of him where he thought they were going.

“Doc thinks we’re going to a coal mine on some hill right behind Hiroshima City.”

Gar started laughing. They were being taken to a coal mine. His old man had been right after all.

Franklin gave Gar a funny look and moved away from him, as a train pulled into the station and stopped in a cloud of steam exhaust. The prisoners were herded into two boxcars. Gar had passed out again and was the last one to be rousted out of the waiting room. The first boxcar’s doors were already shut, so he was driven at bayonet point to the second car and booted into a small group of British POWs. They picked him up and pulled him away from the sliding door, which had been about to break both his feet as the guards pushed it shut. Gar mumbled a quick thanks and then went back down to see his new best friend, oblivion.

They were brought into the camp in dump trucks just after sunset. There were twenty-two of them, eight officers, the rest troops. Gar was the only American in the group. The guards immediately lined them up in two facing ranks — officers on one side, enlisted on the other — then stood behind them with bayonets fixed, one guard for every two prisoners. Wooden telephone poles served as light standards, and yellowish floodlights illuminated the grounds of the camp. They could see what looked like a barracks in front of them, but no other prisoners were visible. By now Gar knew better than to do any obvious rubbernecking, but they could see that the prison perimeter walls were made of sheet metal panels attached to concrete posts. There were watchtowers at the corners and machine guns sticking out of them, pointed down onto the assembly area. Behind the barracks area were some large metal-sided buildings and what looked to Gar like the tip pile from a coal mine. A rail spur, filled with coal cars, came through the back walls of the compound.

In certain parts of the United States, coal was king. By mid-1945 in Japan, coal was king squared. It was so vital that POWs being used as slave labor in the mines worked right alongside regular Japanese coal miners, with the difference being that the miners were fed and the POWs were not. Uncle Charlie Lockwood’s submarine war of attrition had reduced Japan’s oil imports from their Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to almost nothing. They couldn’t burn coal in their warships or airplanes, but just about everything else requiring energy, such as merchant ships, power plants, factories, hospitals, and a good percentage of daily life, ran on coal or even wood. Their coal-mining technology was somewhat primitive compared to the States’, and this was doubly so when diesel fuel dried up. The POWs had become substitutes for powered mining equipment.

There was what had to be an administration building to one side of the open area out in front of the barracks, with covered porches on three sides and a flagpole right in front. As they waited, a guard pulled open the front door to the admin building and then saluted an older Japanese officer as he came out. The officer stopped and looked around the assembly area. This must be the commandant, Gar thought, as the officer walked over to stand at one end of the open space between their two ranks. He was wearing a short-sleeved uniform shirt with badges of rank on its shoulder straps. His trousers were bloused into shiny brown boots, and he wore their version of a squared-off foraging cap. A Sam Browne belt rig across his chest was attached to a large, holstered pistol on his right hip, and an enormous sword dangled from his left. His face was one enormous scowl as he roared out an order.

Nothing happened, and he sounded off again. None of the prisoners knew what he was saying, but the guards apparently did. Two of them stepped forward, slid their rifle barrels over the nearest officer’s shoulder, and pushed down, hard. Apparently some of the officers had been POWs for a long time, because they immediately knelt down on the ground, then squatted backward onto their heels, their hands flat on their thighs, and bowed their heads. The rest of the officers did likewise. The enlisted remained standing. The commandant, if that’s what he was, walked down the line looking at each officer the way an auctioneer might look at a steer. Then he strolled back to the head of the two lines and asked the air a question. One of the guards replied deferentially while pointing at the officer line. The commandant nodded and then made a short speech. Again no one understood until the last man on the officer line, who Gar had been told was a doctor, said something softly. The commandant stared down at him and spat out another order. The doc spoke louder this time. “It’s the honor speech. He wants to know if any of the officers want to kill themselves now to restore their honor. If you do, stand up.”

None of them did.

The commandant gave each officer an inquisitive stare, then grunted. He then went to the doctor, and slapped him across the face as hard as he could. He repeated this welcoming gesture until each of the eight officers kneeling in the dirt had a bloody nose and a bright red palm print on his face. Gar didn’t think his ears could ever ring again, but they did. The enlisted guys in the rank opposite pretended not to watch. Then the commandant went behind the rank of kneeling officers, unzipped his trousers, and proceeded to walk down the line, urinating on the back of every officer. He must have been drinking tea all goddamned morning, Gar thought, because he did a thorough job of it. Then he said something to the guards, who all laughed enthusiastically, and went back to his office.

The guards signaled for the prisoners to get up by prodding them with their bayonets, then marched the officer group over to a small building next to the barracks, where there were two large square cement tanks full of water. One of the guards rigged out a fire hose and hosed all the officers down, fore and aft, after which they were made to strip and take a second fire-hosing, with soap this time. Finally they were told to get into the square tanks and do another soap-down. They then scrubbed their clothes in the tanks and put them back on. The guards drained the tanks, washed them out, and let them refill. The POWs were marched back to the barracks and herded inside with much yelling and cursing in Japanese. The guards locked the doors and posted two sentinels out front.

The enlisted guys were already in the barracks, where it was apparent that the new arrivals weren’t going to be the only occupants. There were two blocks of three-high bunk beds, one set occupied, the other empty. Filthy straw mats served as mattresses, and a block of wood as the pillow. A single sheet was rolled up at the end of each occupied rack. There were no signs of any personal possessions such as shoes, clothes, books, or anything else.

“Where is everyone?” one of the British officers asked.

“Probably down in the mine,” one of the troops said. He also spoke with a British accent.

Gar wondered if he really was the only American here. Many of the Brits seemed to know each other, and he learned that they had all been shipped to Japan from the Dutch Indies on what they called a hell ship. Five hundred POWs left port; 240 made it alive to Japan. The rest died en route of starvation, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, or just plain exhaustion and dehydration.

The doctor who’d been interpreting for the rest of them signaled Gar that he wanted to talk. “Alright then, Yank,” he said, as they sat down together on one of the benches while some of the other officers gathered around. “Who might you be?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Gar told them he was a U.S. Navy commander and erstwhile skipper of a submarine. The doctor asked his date of rank. Surprised, Gar told him.

“Right,” he said. “Anyone beat that?”

The other officers were shaking their heads.

“You, sir,” he announced to Gar, “are Senior One. Tonight when the rest of the chaps get back from the mines, we’ll find out who has been Senior One and whether or not that still stands.”

“Didn’t feel very senior,” Gar said, “when that guy was pissing down my back.”

Some people smiled, but the doctor didn’t.

“Look here,” he said, “I’m Major Alex Morris. I’m a medical officer. M.O. We’ve learned this the hard way, believe you me. The only way we have survived has been to reconstitute our military organization and discipline. The senior officer in the camp, of whatever service or even regiment, becomes Senior One. We establish a chain of command, and we adhere to military discipline. We insist that the Japs deal with Senior One for all matters pertaining to the prisoners.”

“And they tell you to fuck off and die, right?”

The major made a face at Gar’s crude language. “No, surprisingly, they don’t. One must of course observe the conventions. We bow, they don’t bow back. We don’t speak until spoken to. We never look them in the face, because, by surrendering, we have lost our faces.”

“You used the word ‘insist.’”

“Just a figure of speech, Commander. Thing is, most of the camp commandants have figured out that everything runs smoother if they pretend to recognize a military chain of command among the prisoners. With the exception of the occasional sadist, they don’t want problems. They want production, because in their eyes, that’s what prisoners are for — slave labor in coal mines here, copper mines in the north, railroad and bridge building in the far south. I mean, let’s face it. A Japanese army officer assigned as a POW camp commandant is not likely to be held in high regard by the generals, is he. The last thing he needs is an ‘incident,’ a rebellion, a major escape, a drastic drop in production of whatever the hell, or some other problem that causes him to lose face with his higher command, because the consequences of ‘problems’ in the Japanese army is a quiet order to go find your short sword and use it.”

“And you’re saying this gives us leverage?”

“Not at all. We have no leverage, not one iota. At any time and on any given day, they could assemble the lot of us out front and tell the guard towers to open fire. You may not be aware of this, but it is common knowledge that Imperial HQ have given orders to all the camps that all prisoners of war are to be killed at the first sign of an invasion of the Home Islands.”

“No, I did not know that,” Gar said. “Nor do I think my bosses know that.”

“Well, believe it, Commander. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn tonight that even here they’ve been drilling for the occasion. This is a small camp, from the looks of it. Probably dedicated to the one mine, so perhaps the kill-all orders haven’t reached here. Trust me, the larger camps are all firmly on notice.”

“How long have you been a POW?”

“Since the fall of Singapore, I’m afraid.”

“Jesus — that was, what, early ’42?”

“February fifteenth, to be precise, and we will never, ever live it down.”

Three years plus, Gar thought. That made his predicament seem trivial by comparison.

“What you must understand, especially if you become Senior One in this camp, is that we are all role-playing here. The Japanese officers are playing at being little gods. We are, in their eyes, vermin. They are being told that they are winning this war. We prisoners are supposedly evidence of that, and, as I mentioned before, we forfeited every scrap of our manly honor the day we put our hands in the air and our rifles on the ground.”

“They are absolutely not winning this war,” Gar said.

“Bravo,” the doctor said, glancing out the window at the two guards. “And we are all dying, literally in some cases, to hear the latest news. But do not for one moment allow that notion to surface in front of even the lowliest Jappo out there. Understood? You get stroppy, we might all die.”

Gar nodded. “Got it. I’m new to all this, and you guys obviously know how to play this game. I will do my utmost not to cause trouble, but someone’s going to have to educate me on how to act around the Japs.”

“Fear not, Commander,” the doc said, indicating the guards outside with his chin. “You will receive daily instruction.”

The resident POWs, some twenty men, came out of the coal mine a half hour later. They were indistinguishable from the coal they’d been working all day. The new prisoners watched as they passed through a barbed wire man-gate, where they were given a cursory search and then sent through a small fire-hose station, where a bored-looking guard hosed them down one by one. It was a small fire hose, maybe an inch in diameter, but the men were so weak they had to hold on to the wire to keep from being knocked down by the stream. Their soaking-wet clothes highlighted their skeletal frames, and about a third of them had to be helped by one of the others just to make it down the hill from the mine and into the barracks enclosure. Even after everything this new crew of Brits had endured on their long voyage from Southeast Asia, they looked to be in better shape than these poor bastards. The new prisoners moved away from the windows and clustered at the back of the barracks among the empty bunk beds.

The “residents” trooped in a silent single file up the steps between the two sneering guards and into the common room of the barracks. They went to the three tables grouped together in the middle of the room and sat down, side by side, on long wooden benches. They gave no indication that they’d seen the new people, and they looked to be so exhausted it was possible that they didn’t even know others were there. Each man sat hunched over the wooden table, his forearms on the table, hands splayed out in front, head bowed, as if in communal prayer. Even from across the room Gar thought they smelled of near-death. Then one of them, an older-looking man in the first seat next to the doors, gave a quiet order.

“You lot back there,” he said, in a fairly refined British accent. “Don’t move.”

Okay, so they did know there were new people, Gar thought. There were no lights on in the barracks, only the glow from some of the perimeter spots out along the metal fence. Then the front doors opened, and a tiny old man came into the room with a basket filled with rice balls. He set the basket on the table nearest to the door and scuttled back out. He returned carrying a galvanized 2-gallon oilcan with a long, flexible metal spout, which he also put on the table. Then he left, muttering to himself, and the guards pulled the doors shut behind him.

“Rations,” the older man said. He picked up the basket, extracted one rice ball, and passed the basket down the table. Each man took one ball of rice and began to eat it, holding it in his blackened hands and nibbling the individual grains, chewing each grain slowly as if it hurt his teeth. Once everyone had finished his rice, two men got up and between them carried the oil can down the line, allowing each prisoner to have two audible gulps of whatever was in the can — water, Gar presumed. It was almost ritualistic, what they were doing, but it was clear they could all see that the resident prisoners’ individual focus didn’t go past the next moment. Rice. Eat. Water. Drink.

“Benjo detail,” the older man said. Once again, two of the healthier-looking men got up and helped two very sick-looking men to the front door. The guards opened the doors and let the four of them out. The older man looked over at them. “Anyone needs the loo, now is the time,” he said. About half of the new group started forward toward the doors, but the older man put up a hand. “In ranks, single file, heads down, hands flat at your sides, wait at the doors until they tell you to come out, and then go out one at a time. Do not look at them.”

The new prisoners looked at each other and then formed the single line. They’d already found two piss-tubes in the back of the barracks; benjo detail was for more serious alimentary functions, especially for the men who were experiencing severe GI problems. The two men being helped out to the latrines were skeletal in the spotlights. Their skin was jaundiced and stretched across their cheekbones like parchment. Several of the others weren’t in much better shape. Considering what they’d been through, and for how long, Gar realized that his captivity so far, beatings and bombings included, had probably been a cakewalk.

The original group of prisoners left the tables and hobbled to their racks. Major Morris took Gar over and introduced him to the older man, who turned out to be another army major, Willingham by name, an artilleryman from a Yorkshire regiment. Gar’s rank as a navy commander was theoretically equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the army, and thus he was now the senior officer in the camp. Theoretically.

“Congratulations,” Willingham said with a weak smile. “Do you have the vaguest idea of what you’re supposed to do?”

“None whatsoever,” Gar said.

“Lovely,” he said with a sigh. “What do you think, Dr. Morris?”

“I think we should leave things just as they are,” Morris said immediately. “You are look older than the commander here, and the Jappos respect age more than some table of equivalent ranks.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” Gar said before Willingham could say anything. “I know nothing about what to do here. I could get us all killed.”

Willingham gave him a long stare. He was thin as a rail and weary beyond measure. His eyes were hollow and rheumy. There was coal dust in every seam of his face and hands. He looked to be in his seventies but was probably only a few years older than Gar was.

“Are you quite sure, Commander?” he asked. “As Senior One, you would have some protection from the more sadistic of the guards. As the lone American, well…”

“I understand, Major,” Gar said. “For a little while they thought I was going to be useful to them. I was being taken to some place called Ofuna, near Tokyo, but after the Kure bombing, I think I got lost in the shuffle.”

“Ofuna is the navy’s POW center. It has a rather harsh reputation. You won’t think so, but you’re probably better off here.”

“Even when the commandant uses us for a urinal?”

“That wasn’t the commandant. That was the political officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kai. Kempeitai bastard. Fanatical like the whole lot of them. The commandant is Colonel Kashiwabara. Southerner. Has his family in Nagasaki. Not fanatical, which is probably why Kai was assigned.”

“He looked ready to pull that sword and make all our heads roll.”

“He is always ready to do that. Has Major Morris explained to you about the order to execute all the prisoners when the invasion begins?”

“He has.”

“Do you have any idea of when an invasion might come?”

“Okinawa, any day now,” Gar said. “The Philippines are back in human hands. Guam, Tinian, too. Your guys have most of Burma back in the British fold. The Home Islands, late this year, early next year.”

“Okinawa could be considered a home territory,” Morris said. All Gar could do was shrug. Okinawa was a thousand miles from Japan proper.

Senior One asked how Gar came to be captured, and he related what had happened to him since they were surprised near Bungo Suido. As they were talking, men began returning from the benjo detail, and a guard started yelling into the barracks. Senior One put up his hand and told Gar and Major Morris to get the new people into bunks.

“We’ll talk more later,” he said. “Sorry about no food. There’s a water pipe in the back of the barracks. Don’t let the guards see you using it.”

“Why no food?” Gar asked.

“You haven’t earned any,” he said. “Yet.”

Their day began at dawn. They’d be rousted out of their unheated barracks and given one golf ball of pasty white rice and two swallows of warm mystery fluid masquerading as either tea or soup — they could never tell which, but they consumed it religiously because that was going to be it until evening. The mine was bored into a high ridge that lay between them and the northeastern environs of Hiroshima City, which was just on the other side. Unbelievably, the guards would make them do morning calisthenics, if one could call it that. They were a squadron of wobbly skeletons going through the motions of flapping their arm and leg bones in the morning twilight while the guards did the real thing, constantly mocking the prisoners as they flailed weakly, trying not to fall into each other; the really sick ones lay back against the outside walls of the barracks, leaking at both ends. This was followed by the daily bowing ceremony, where they were forced to bow to a highly stylized picture of the emperor mounted in a boxy little shrine outside the commandant’s office. Anyone not bowing “sincerely” would be hustled off to the punishment cells by two guards. They’d pass a stick between the prisoner’s legs, jerk-lift him onto it, and trot across the grounds to the steel-sided building, making sure to keep their arms nice and rigid in the process. Earlier in the war officers had been exempted from slave labor, but things were very different now.

The POWs would then be marched, sometimes through snow, to the mine entrance, where everyone was searched. They never figured out what the Japs were looking for, but they were always searched, going in and coming back out. Then they’d crawl into enclosed transporter cars hooked together in a train, where six of them would be squeezed into a tiny compartment made for four Japanese, requiring them to bend their heads onto their knees. The train was parked on a slight incline leading down into the mine, so a guard would simply release the brakes and it would start moving down into the dark and the heat, eventually to the accompaniment of squealing brakes as it gathered speed. The tunnels were wide enough for two sets of tracks but only 5 feet from floor to ceiling. Once they got to the coal face, they’d crawl out and then lift the cars of the people-carrier from one track to the one alongside so that it could be pulled back up. The next train down would bring the regular mine workers and more guards.

The day consisted of using picks and shovels to gather up the coal that had been blasted by the all-Japanese night shift, prisoners not being trusted around explosives. They’d load individual coal skips, and then four of them would push the loaded, half-ton cars back out to the main chamber, where an engine would then take eleven at a time back out to the mine entrance. To Gar’s surprise, most of the main tunnels in this mine were unsupported, which led to a lot of cave-ins, usually when they were blasting. The Japs were apparently used to that. The night shift would get trapped behind a rockfall. The prisoners and other Jap miners would clear it all out, and the night shift would come out looking none the worse for wear. It scared the hell out of the prisoners, of course.

There was little forced ventilation down there, so it was always hot and wet. During the winter, that was better than wet and cold, but by the end of July those of them who could still stand and work were on their last legs. Initially they’d been beaten for any infraction, real or imagined. As the summer wore on and the effective working numbers shrank, the Japs stopped doing that, probably because they realized why production was falling. Senior One’s prediction about Gar being the lone American turned out to be spot on, as the Brits would say. It was bad enough for the Brits and the few Dutchmen in their group, but the guards made sure Gar knew how happy they were to have a Yank in the mix. A couple of times he was beaten senseless, only to wake up down in the mine, where he was expected to immediately get back to work. There were times he couldn’t even stand up. The guards would then drag him over to the coal-skip rails at the head of the tunnel. He’d either move himself or be run over. He learned to just lie there, resting, until he felt the thrumming vibrations in the steel tracks that told him a train was coming down. Then and only then he’d crawl off the tracks. The guards would laugh, and money would change hands. The whole thing had been a bet.

TWENTY-NINE

At the end of his first month in the camp, Gar had a near-fatal confrontation with the guards at the face. He’d started work as usual but then realized four guards were watching him and talking something over, which sounded like they were working themselves up to a little fun with the American prisoner. The shortest one, who looked like a caricature of a Japanese soldier on an American propaganda poster, wandered over and demanded something in Japanese. The other POWs pretended not to notice, mostly to avoid a stick across their backs. Gar had no idea of what the man wanted, so he stood there, head down, not looking at the increasingly agitated soldier. One of the other guards came up behind him and whacked Gar’s hands with his baton where they held the crude pick. Gar dropped the pick and folded his stinging hands into his stomach. The guards then indicated he should get back to work, but using his hands rather than a pick to claw down bits of coal from the seam.

Gar tried but made no headway. The coal wasn’t very good quality, but he could not force any of it out of the seam. The guards laughed at him and “encouraged” him to try harder with their bamboo batons. He didn’t know what to do, which was probably the whole point. The little soldier was the most aggressive; he kept badgering Gar with his stick and then with his boots until Gar snapped. Whirling in place, he landed a right cross to the soldier’s face that almost snapped his neck and certainly broke his jaw. The soldier went flying across the workspace and lay still in a heap under one of the coal carts.

For one moment there was stunned silence, but then the remaining guards, all yelling at the top of their lungs, converged on Gar with their sticks. Gar rolled into a ball and then scuttled under a second coal cart to escape the beating. He wasn’t thinking anymore, just reacting. Suddenly the beating stopped and hands were grabbing at his legs. He kicked back at them, but it was no use. He simply wasn’t strong enough. When they pulled him out from under the coal car, one of the Jap sergeants was standing there with a pistol in his hand. Gar figured this was it and, at that juncture, almost didn’t care. The other prisoners had stopped working when Gar had cold-cocked the little Jap.

The sergeant said something to Gar in Japanese. One of the Brits, who apparently understood, told Gar to stand up. He did so, slowly, alert for another bashing. The sergeant said something else, indicating with his pistol that Gar was to turn around and start marching. Gar couldn’t figure out which way the sergeant wanted him to go, as there were four tunnels converging at the coal face, so he picked the main tunnel going back up to the mine entrance. The sergeant yelled at him and indicated he was going the wrong way. He then pointed his pistol down a side tunnel leading away and down from the coal face. Gar complied, stepping over the narrow-gauge tracks and their ties. The sergeant remained behind him, well out of range of any tricks Gar might try, as they crunched their way deeper into the tunnel. The lights strung overhead became more infrequent, but Gar had no illusions about getting away from the sergeant.

Finally they came to what looked like the end of the tunnel. Gar stopped up against the rock face, hands at his sides, waiting to see what would happen. He half-expected to hear the pistol and feel a bullet drilling through him, but then he felt a strong hand grab his hair from behind and an even stronger knee in his back, bending him backward like a bow. He windmilled his arms instinctively trying to stay upright as the sergeant pulled him backward to one side of the tunnel. He could smell the man’s fishy breath as he leaned in close, his pistol barrel digging into Gar’s neck. The sergeant said something in a low, incomprehensible growl, then at last jerked Gar to the right and kicked his feet out from under him. Gar felt himself dropping into darkness and then colliding with a steep slope of rock and gravel as he continued falling, accompanied now by a small avalanche of gravel and dust. After what seemed like an eternity, the slope began to flatten out until he was brought up short against a rock wall. His friendly avalanche proceeded to bury his lower legs before subsiding into silence and total darkness. Then the guard up at the top started shooting.

The tunnel did strange things to the sound of gunfire, but the bullets whacking into the surrounding dirt and howling off the rock walls as they ricocheted in the darkness sounded just like bullets. He felt a tug on the fabric of his right sleeve, and another one on his left leg, blunted by the fact that there was nearly a foot of dirt and gravel on top of his leg. Then he heard a yell from way up above and realized that something was coming down. Instinctively he jerked his feet out of the scree and slithered across the bottom of the hole until his face whacked into solid rock. A moment later something heavy arrived at the bottom in a second hail of loose rock, gravel, and coal dust, followed by the unmistakable sound of a bone snapping in the darkness. The snap was punctuated by a loud scream. Then silence.

Gar didn’t know what had happened or what to do next. He couldn’t see a thing, and every breath he took was full of dust. Then he realized his eyes were clamped shut. He opened them cautiously, still flattened against a solid rock wall. He had to blink several times to get the dust out of his stinging eyes. Then he thought he heard something. He listened carefully. Something was down there with him, moaning occasionally. He looked in the direction that he thought was up and discerned a grayish circle at the very top of the shaft. His eyes filled with tears as the coal dust irritated them, and his vision began to swim. He blinked rapidly until it cleared again. Then came another moan from somewhere in front of him. He finally figured out what had happened: Some part of the hole had caved in, and the sergeant had joined him at the bottom of the pit.

His first thought was to find that gun, assuming it had come down, too. The circle of gray light way up at the top did not extend to the bottom, so he could only feel his way on his hands and knees. He made small moves, trying not to make noise, although the more he listened, the more he became convinced that the sergeant was drifting in and out of consciousness. His fingers felt one of the sergeant’s boots, and next to that was the pistol. He picked it up and pushed it back toward the pile of gravel that had broken his own fall, then backed up, in the direction of the far wall from which he’d come. His upper right arm was stinging. He felt the area. The fabric of his sleeve was sticky and wet. He knew he was lucky not to be dead, but now what the hell would he do? Then he realized the bottom of his pants was wet.

Pissed myself, he thought. Wonderful.

Except — he hadn’t. As he felt around the bottom of the shaft, he realized there was water. There hadn’t been any water there a few minutes ago. As he sat there, his befuddled brain trying to work it out, he realized that his fingertips were slowly being covered by water. The damned shaft was flooding. All those bullets had opened something up.

He sat back against the wall and tried to figure out what to do. After resting for five minutes with both eyes closed, he realized he could see better than before as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He discovered the remains of a ladder going up one side of the shaft. Every third or fourth rung was missing, but the sides were still there, anchored into the rock with metal fasteners. He had no idea of how far up he’d have to climb, but he wasn’t going to stay down at the bottom of this hole. He stuffed the gun into his pants pocket. He wondered if it was still loaded and chambered, but it hardly mattered; not knowing how to unload it, he just hoped for the best. If there was water seeping into the shaft, he had to get up that ladder.

It took him half an hour of climbing and resting to get to the top of the shaft. By the time he reached the lighted tunnel, he was having to wedge his left arm through the ladder attachment rings just to keep himself from falling back down into the shaft before attempting the next rung. The overhead light revealed what had happened. Fully half of the rim around the shaft had collapsed all the way back out into the middle of the tunnel. The gunfire had probably initiated the cave-in. There was room for Gar to crawl past the semicircular hole in the floor, but just barely. Finally he staggered back up to his feet.

He’d expected a crowd after all the shooting and then the noise of the cave-in, but there was no one there. He hadn’t been down there that long — maybe an hour? There was only one way to go, and that was back to the work area in front of the coal face. He could dimly hear the sounds of machinery back down the tunnel. Up the tunnel, he realized when he started back, his breath wheezing as he made the climb. He pulled the pistol out of his pocket and checked it out while standing under one of the lights. It appeared to be either a 9 mm or .38 caliber. He popped the magazine and counted four rounds left. Plus one in the chamber, he calculated.

Carrying the gun in his right hand, he trudged back toward the work area, bent over as usual to keep from banging his head on the low ceiling. His right arm had stopped bleeding, and he was pretty sure it was a glancing wound, not a through-and-through. When he came around the corner into the coal-face work area, everyone, guards, civilian mine workers, and prisoners, froze in succession as they realized he was standing there with a pistol in his hand. The guards were armed only with batons; only the detail sergeant carried a gun. They were all staring at Gar as if Lazarus had just emerged from his grave, which was not all that far off the mark.

Gar had five rounds and there were five guards. He could shoot them all and then — what? Lead an escape to the mine entrance, where four machine-gun towers and the rest of the guards would be waiting?

He pointed the gun at the oldest of the guards, who quailed, dropping his baton and putting up his hands to ward off the expected bullet. Gar gestured with his other hand for the guard to come to him. The man stepped forward, his own hands still out in front of him, and started talking. Gar yelled at him to shut up. Then he gestured for the rest of the guards to come with him. They looked at each other but didn’t move until Gar lowered the gun to his side and gestured again. Then he turned around and started walking back. Gabbling among themselves, the five guards followed, accompanied by about a half-dozen prisoners.

When they got to the hole, Gar pointed down toward the bottom and then at the pistol. The guards were mystified, but then the older one understood. He pointed down into the hole and said what sounded like a name, his eyebrows rising in a question. Gar nodded and then picked up a rock and dropped it over the edge of the hole. Everyone could hear the splash down below. When he saw understanding on the face of the older guard, he handed him the pistol. For a moment he wondered if he’d really screwed up, but suddenly there was more urgent gabbling, and then they got to work. Gar sat down about 20 feet from the hole with the other prisoners and watched as the guards mounted a rescue effort. An hour later they brought the sergeant up in a makeshift litter made from a cargo net, assisted by everyone in the tunnel pulling on a long rope. The sergeant was in and out of consciousness, and his right leg showed clear evidence of a compound fracture.

One of the Brits came over after the rescue and shook his head.

“They’ll either blame you for his injury,” he said, “or the sergeant. Should be interesting, either way.”

“Can’t wait,” Gar said. “I need to get this cleaned up, though. Before they shoot me.”

In the event the camp commandant summoned Senior One and chewed him out for what Gar had done to the short guard. He then said that, because Gar had not left the sergeant down there to drown or killed him at the bottom of the shaft, he would not be punished further. Thereafter, the guards tended to leave Gar alone, and he wondered if that was a temporary thing or a sign that this horrible war was coming to an end. Lieutenant Colonel Kai had protested fiercely, but Gar thought the commandant was perhaps beginning to prepare for the future.

THIRTY

In mid-July three U.S. Army doctors were brought in from another POW camp. They’d been captured with Wainwright in the Bataan campaign and were now experts in how to serve time as a POW of the Japanese. They provided what little medical treatment they could. POWs sick with dysentery, asthma, influenza, malaria, and other assorted diseases were kept in what was euphemistically called sick bay, which was one end of the barracks screened off by hanging blankets. Anyone who died was taken to the camp crematorium. His ashes were buried in a well-like common grave that grew bigger and bigger as the summer dragged on. Each box of ashes had a small number tag, which the Japs nailed to a tree near the gravesite.

The bombing raids had intensified in July. The prisoners were usually down in the mine by daylight, so they never saw contrails, but their nights were filled with the sound of many rumbling engines passing high overhead, going north, and then coming back out again. There were rumors that the northern, more industrialized parts of Japan were getting hammered, but it may have been wishful thinking. There was no denying the nightly formations, though. The prisoners did wonder why they didn’t bomb Hiroshima City; perhaps Kure had been the only militarily important target in the area. In the middle of July the Japs made them paint the letters POW on the roof of the barracks and their own buildings, probably figuring that that should fireproof the mining operation from the B-29s.

On the first day of August there was a major cave-in during the nighttime blasting work. The fittest prisoners were sent into the main tunnel the next morning to begin removing rubble, but the work was stopped at noon and everyone ordered back out. The fate of the miners trapped behind the rubble was not revealed. That night the Japs told them that they were going to be moved from this camp to one farther south, where the Kawasaki Company had a much bigger coal mine. Apparently “their” coal mine had flooded as a result of the cave-in, which meant it was finished as a productive asset. They were all aware that the general mood at the camp had changed markedly in July, with the Japs seeming not to care so much about what they were getting done in the mine. The guards acted dispirited, as if the real news from the front had finally begun to penetrate the propaganda screen. The POWs, on the other hand, sensing that the defeat of Japan was approaching in proportion to the number of planes coming overhead at night, became a tiny bit more confident and determined to live through the hell of being prisoners. One of the doctors who could speak Japanese and had been asked to treat the commandant for something or other told them that the commandant was getting worried about what would happen to him once the war was over. Everyone came up with ideas on that subject, although they rarely saw the actual commandant. Kai was another matter.

A week after the cave-in, they handed out cotton laundry bags, told the prisoners to gather up their meager possessions, and fall in on the square out in front of the barracks by 0730. Conveniently for the Japanese, this meant that they skipped any form of breakfast. As the prisoners were released from the barracks, they were surprised to find the parade ground littered with leaflets. The small scraps of paper were covered in kanji, the Japanese symbol language. It looked like they had blown across the ridge from Hiroshima City the day before. One of the prisoners went to pick up a leaflet and then quickly dropped it when the guards went ballistic. Apparently it was forbidden to even notice the leaflets, much less touch one. The prisoners couldn’t read them anyway; they had a much more basic need for small pieces of paper.

Paper rain.

Gar remembered that paper rain had been Hashimoto’s cue to go to Hiroshima City and turn the mysterious thing from OFF to ON. As they waited in crooked ranks, he wondered if the old man had managed it, or if he was even still alive. Based on the appearance of many civilian workers in the camp, food for the general population had become even scarcer than the last time he’d seen Hashimoto beneath the pier. The engineers driving the coal trains looked like skeletons, and they were all from the north. The people living along the shores of the Inland Sea could at least catch fish.

Their attention was distracted by the arrival of four army trucks that clattered into the yard in front of the barracks, their exhausts smelling like popcorn. The officer known as Kai came out and met with another officer from the truck convoy. The truck officer seemed bored with his mission, while Kai was full of himself, as usual, shouting and gesturing fiercely. The truck officer lit up a cigarette and waved a hand at all the assembled prisoners, as if to say, you want ’em loaded, you load ’em. This made Kai even madder, and there were more verbal fireworks, bringing the camp commandant to his office doorway to see what the problem was. He was just in time to see a magnesium flare ignite right above the camp. It was a really big magnesium flare, but strangely, it made no noise — no pop or bang, just the whitest light any of them had ever seen. They were all squinting through their fingers as they slowly realized that it had not gone off overhead but farther south, just over the ridge that stood between the camp and Hiroshima City.

The incredible light threw that ridge into stark relief, etching every rocky feature along the ridgeline into the glowing sky. Gar could see the black silhouettes of birds being wiped from the sky by some invisible hand, and then came a sudden and prolonged feeling of ear- and lung-squeezing noise, not a clap of thunder but rather a long crescendo of awful power, followed by an enormous rumbling cloud of burning gases, smoke, dust, and tiny bits of debris rising into the air, going much too fast, pumping straight up into the high atmosphere and filled with boiling red and yellow flame that lasted for what seemed an extraordinarily long time. Everyone, guards and prisoners alike, was transfixed by this apparition that got bigger and bigger as the seconds ticked by, violently shaking the ground like an earthquake and still rumbling as it billowed upward and finally began to expand at the top as the thermal column hit the icy air at 30,000 feet, the altitude at which the B-29s traveled. It was large enough that they wondered if it would reach them here in the camp when it collapsed.

One of the American army docs said it for all of them. “What the fuck is that?”

THIRTY-ONE

The drivers had shut down their trucks and climbed out to look, spellbound by the sight of that still-luminous cloud, which was now turning black at its base, as if whatever was underneath it were beginning to burn in earnest. The rumbling noise had subsided, but there was a great wind blowing toward the base of that cloud, strong enough to bend trees over and make most of the POWs hunch over or get down on the ground to keep from being blown up and over the ridge. A hail of dust and small rocks flailed their backs for a full minute, and the tin roof panels on the buildings chattered away like a chorus of snare drums.

It was clear the Japs didn’t know what to do and were looking to the commandant for orders. That worthy was still standing on the porch of his office, mouth agape, as he watched that titanic cloud begin to curl at the top and assume an unsettling likeness to a poisonous mushroom in some God-sized vegetable garden. Whereas the commandant looked shocked, Lieutenant Colonel Kai looked even more furious, if that was possible. Everyone could hear the shrill ringing of a telephone inside the office over the shrieking wind, but the commandant was ignoring it as he stared upward at that hideous cloud.

Finally Major Willingham gestured that the prisoners should go back into the barracks. Everyone moved slowly, so as not to arouse the guards or Kai, and slunk back inside. The Jap guards did nothing to stop them, and eventually they all followed the prisoners into the barracks, looking over their shoulders at the monstrous shape blotting out the sun to the south and west. They were visibly shaken by what they’d just seen, and so were the prisoners. The cloud reminded Gar of a picture he’d seen of Mount Etna going off, and he wondered aloud if it would come back to earth and wipe them all out.

There’d been neither air raid sirens nor the sounds they usually heard when a large B-29 raid came in from the south, only that eye-searing white light, blooming just out of their sightline behind the ridge. Now that Gar thought about it, he could also see in his mind’s eye what looked like an expanding transparent sphere of pure, multicolored energy racing out from the hidden center of the white light. He’d seen something similar to that when they’d torpedoed what turned out to be a Jap ammo ship off Luzon. This thing, whatever it was, had been many hundred times the force and scale of that blast. One of the prisoners wondered aloud if those leaflets had had anything to do with what had just happened. They could see through the windows the contrast between a normal sunrise to the east and the looming shadow of that enormous cloud to the south and, increasingly, west of the camp as the high winds clawed at the tops.

A guard sergeant burst through the door and shouted at the other guards, who’d been hanging around in the common area of the open-bay barracks as if wondering what to do next. Jap sergeants and officers never just issued orders — they always shouted them as if they were perpetually furious at their subordinates, who in turn jerked into quick bows and then hustled back outside. The prisoners went to the windows and saw the commandant and Lieutenant Colonel Kai engaged in a heated discussion on their office porch. An underling appeared in the office doorway with two telephones in his hands, and the commandant threw some papers down on the floor and grabbed the nearest phone. They could hear emergency vehicles going by outside the fence in the direction of Hiroshima City, where they could see a lower, more familiar black cloud assembling. It looked to Gar as if the whole city might be on fire behind the ridge, if all that smoke was any indication.

The sergeant came back into the barracks, glared at all of them, and then stepped back outside, where he locked the doors. Apparently their little outing to the other coal mine was off for the day. For the next few hours they heard many vehicles racing by the prison compound, some with sirens but most without. There was endless speculation about what had happened. According to some of the air force pilots, Hiroshima was a major ammunition assembly point. Perhaps a large ammo ship had exploded in the harbor, in turn setting off a warehouse or two. Most of them, though, felt that this was something new and very different. Ammo dump explosions often went on for hours, with trails of rockets and other munitions visible all over the place. This hadn’t been like that at all. This had been a single colossal blast, so big that half the city had gone up into the air — and stayed there.

By late afternoon the vehicles were coming the other way, out of the city, over the ridge, and down past the POW camp. Now they were going much slower, and they were loaded with casualties, horrible ones. By evening there were columns of civilians walking among the crawling line of cars and trucks coming over the pass from Hiroshima City. Many of the walking wounded were so badly burned that their faces appeared to be dripping off their skulls like hot wax. Any of them who fell by the wayside were simply left. The prisoners had no idea of where the walking wounded were all going, but it was clear that the number of casualties in the city was in the thousands, not hundreds. After a while the gates to the compound were opened and some of the injured were diverted into the camp’s central assembly area. They staggered in, the wounded helping the dying, dropping in rows and columns on the parade ground, while the guards watched in horror. The prisoners took care to remain inconspicuous as they stared out the dirty windows, standing to one side so as not to be too obvious. Gar saw one horrifically burned woman being given a cup of water, oblivious to the fact that it was pouring out of a hole in her throat as fast as she was drinking it.

Over the ridge there was still a vast cloud of smoke, bending to the west as the evening winds rose out of the Inland Sea and blew toward the Sea of Japan and distant Korea. The towering cloud had dissipated by then, but this new one indicated that everything that could still burn down in the city was burning. Another wave of emergency vehicles, with different markings, came down the road and went over the ridge, followed by a column of army trucks filled with soldiers.

At sunset the commandant and Kai were observed heading toward the barracks. The prisoners all scattered to their racks and away from the front windows. Kai unlocked the door and stood back to let the commandant in. Kashiwabara spoke some English and now shouted for all of them to get outside.

“You help,” he demanded. “Outside. Now. You help.”

Gar wasn’t sure what they could do for the writhing mass of severely burned humanity on the ground, but out they came, dispersing through the huddled figures in the near darkness to do what they could. The first thing they noticed was the smell. A sweetish odor of overcooked meat permeated the enclosed prison compound, threaded with more elemental smells as people died where they lay on the grounds. The guards were making rounds with wooden buckets of water and small towels, and the prisoners’ job became one of tending to individuals, wiping away burned flesh or administering sips of water. The burns were the most severe Gar had ever seen, revealing blue white bone in many cases every time they used a towel. Many of the victims could breathe only in a rapid-paced series of tiny puffs, and once they started doing that, they died before long. As the night wore on, the prisoners were detailed to carry bodies off the assembly area into a corner of the compound. They didn’t need lights — there was a deep red glow in the sky coming from over the ridge as Hiroshima or whatever was left of it continued to burn through the night.

By dawn the area within the compound had settled into a profound silence. Gar realized that none of the two hundred or so wounded who’d been let into the prison camp were still alive. The prisoners were exhausted from their night’s work. Most of them just lay down on the ground and tried to sleep. The guards did the same. The commandant had spent the entire night on the front porch of his headquarters building, just staring out into the darkness. Kai hadn’t been seen since they’d come to roust out the prisoners. Rumor had it that he’d gone into the city on the other side of the ridge. There was no food that morning.

Major Willingham was afraid that there would now be a mass execution of the prisoners. They all felt a terrible sense of foreboding. When the Japs came to their senses, they’d want blood for whatever had happened over the ridge. Then Gar heard air raid sirens starting up to the east of them, away from the city. Nobody seemed to know what to do. None of the guards did anything at all, so everyone just looked up into the dawn light and waited to see what was coming next. Finally they could see two lone contrails flying from east to west, very high over Hiroshima City, and then south until they were out of sight. Photo-recce birds, no doubt, Gar thought, coming to see what had happened to the city.

The prisoners spent the rest of the morning clearing away the rest of the bodies, carrying them in litters down to the crematorium building beyond the mine entrance. They kept wondering if there’d be rations, but the little old man never showed. As best they could tell, there were none for the guards, either. The prisoners straggled back to the barracks building in ones and twos, went in, and hit their racks after getting some water from the communal tap. Gar washed his hands and face and then dropped into his rack still stinking of the night’s work. They all did. He fell asleep immediately but was roused seconds later by a sudden shaking, and instinctively waved his hand to swat away whoever was trying to get him up.

“Get out, out, everybody out!” someone was yelling. Gar opened his eyes to see everything not nailed down in the building dancing in place as an earthquake rattled their side of the ridge, raising whitish clouds of dust outside and shattering what few glass windows were still left in the barracks building. Gar could see the light fixtures swaying back and forth at the end of their hanging poles, and then some of them even came down, their bulbs exploding on the floor, as some of the prisoners tried to crawl out of the shaking building on their hands and knees.

Something in Gar’s brain said, Screw it. He felt exactly the way he’d felt right after the bombing at Kure — overwhelmed, desperately hungry, despairing, surprisingly indifferent. He pulled the sheet over his head and just lay there, waiting for it all to stop, one way or the other, and he knew he wasn’t the only one doing that. Eventually the shaking did end. A sudden warm breeze blew through the barracks, lifting the sheet off his face and blowing all the dust away. One end wall had cracked open, and all he could think of was that they finally had air-conditioning. He went back to sleep.

THIRTY-TWO

Two days later they were told that the entire group was definitely going to be moved to the prison camp servicing the Kawasaki coal mine. Once again they packed up their belongings in the cotton bags and mustered in front of the barracks at daybreak. Lieutenant Colonel Kai came out with his entire staff of six officers, and the prisoners immediately noticed something different — they were all wearing their swords. The English-speaking adjutant then directed that all the prisoners be separated into groups of five. They straggled out of ranks with their bags and congregated in small clumps in the assembly area. There was a larger contingent of troops in the area than usual, all toting rifles with fixed bayonets. Everyone was hungry. They’d received one meal yesterday consisting of some kind of soup laced with rice and what looked like bamboo shoots. This morning, however, there’d been only a single oilcan of bitter tea for all the prisoners.

Once the smaller groups had been separated, more soldiers showed up from the direction of the main gate. These were faces they hadn’t seen before, and each soldier was bearing a rifle with bayonet affixed. They’d obviously been briefed in advance, because there was no yelling of orders this time. They spread out into the assembly area, forming a hollow square of inward-pointing bayonets, making it clear that no one was going to leave. When they were finished getting into position, there were two soldiers standing behind each prisoner.

Suddenly Gar became afraid. Kai’s expression was unusually fierce, and he refused to look any of them in the face while all the additional soldiers formed that hollow square. The sun had just risen in a bright yellow sunrise that threw fantastical colors over the camp and the north-facing ridge rising between the camp and Hiroshima City. None of the usual Japanese workmen were present in the camp this morning. The guards in the towers were not visible, either, but their machine-gun barrels were.

Then Kai drew himself up to his full height and began giving a speech, his words and intonation rising in anger as he got into it. Most of the prisoners, of course, could not understand more than a word or two, but they watched warily as his officers began to spread out into a line abreast, all of them watching the prisoners intently. The soldiers forming the hollow square pushed in with their bayonets, compressing the little groups of five closer together. It looked rehearsed, and Gar remembered the doctor talking about the Japs practicing for the day of the kill-all order. Had the invasion begun? That enormous explosion across the ridge — had that been the opening gun for the final invasion?

Kai finished speaking. Gar saw the commandant appear on the porch of his admin building. He didn’t look too happy. The adjutant nodded once to the sergeant in charge of the five-man group nearest Kai. Immediately one of the group, an Aussie, yelled in pain as two bayonets were jabbed into his lower back, forcing him to step out of the group in the direction of the lieutenant colonel. Senior One started to object but was quickly silenced by one of the bayonet-wielding soldiers standing behind him, who thumped him in the head with his rifle butt, knocking him to his knees.

As they watched in growing horror, the Aussie, an emaciated twenty-two-year-old man who looked fifty, was forced to kneel in front of Kai, who then drew his big sword in one swift and practiced motion. He began shouting again, like a man who had to work up the courage for what he was about to do. At one point all the soldiers in the compound started yelling banzai, and then Kai lifted that gleaming sword and brought it down in a vicious arc that partially severed the Aussie’s head from his torso. A second stroke finished the job, and the headless body flopped down on the ground, bleeding profusely, but not for long.

A second prisoner was driven forward while Lieutenant Colonel Kai wiped his blade clean on the tattered clothes of the dead Aussie. This time the adjutant had his sword out. The prisoners began looking around for a way out of this, but that palisade of lowered bayonets made it clear that any kind of resistance was hopeless. Gar was ready to do something, anything. They might all die, but they’d go down fighting, and they might manage to take a few of these monsters with them. Then Gar felt a bayonet at the base of his own spine and froze.

Suddenly several of the soldiers cried out simultaneously. Everyone looked up and then to the south, where another tungsten white glow was blooming on the horizon, many miles away but no less impressive than what they’d seen two days before: that eye-searing white light painting the underbelly of a high cloud deck, followed by a luminous, multihued expanding sphere of energy lasting only a fragment of a second, and following that the towering cloud boiling up above the distant horizon, looking even bigger and wider than the one they’d seen before as it pushed quickly into the stratosphere. It took a half minute for that deep rumble to reach the compound. There was no blast of wind in either direction this time, but the titanic cloud looked like the arm of God, gripping the island to the south of them and shaking it to its core for what seemed like forever.

All of them, Japs and prisoners, were transfixed by the sight, and then the prisoners began looking sideways for a way out of the ring of steel knives surrounding them. Kai sheathed his sword and stepped backward into the courtyard to get a better view. He needn’t have bothered, because that cloud was definitely bigger than the one that had risen over Hiroshima City, even though it had to be 40 or even 50 miles distant. Up on the porch, the commandant’s hands rose to the sides of his face as he stared in absolute horror and started repeating the word “Nagasaki” in an anguished voice. Some of the soldiers behind them also repeated that word, but in a different tone, one that revealed deep fear.

As if on signal, they began to back away from the prisoners. A phone started ringing inside the commandant’s office. An enlisted clerk inside answered it, listened for a few seconds, made a wailing sound, and then appeared in the door to give the commandant a message. Again that word, “Nagasaki,” and they guessed that the clerk was telling the commandant that the city was no more, because he fell to his knees and began to weep ostentatiously, while the rest of his officers and soldiers began chattering excitedly. Gar kept watching Kai and the soldiers. Either they were all going to die right then and there, or the garrison was going to fall apart.

At that moment a small jeeplike vehicle arrived at the front gate and beeped its horn urgently. One of the guards handed his rifle to another soldier and ran to open the steel gates. The vehicle sped in and stopped in a screech of dust, and an older Japanese officer got out. A column of army trucks that had been following the jeep ground to a halt just outside the gates. The older officer, who was probably a full colonel or possibly even a brigadier, took one look around the assembly area, taking in the scene: the crumpled figure of the Commandant still on his knees up on the porch, Kai cleaning his sword again, and then the headless body lying in the dirt. When he spoke, it was in a much deeper tone of voice, filled with quiet authority, with none of the hysterical shouting of the camp’s officers. They were all at attention now, their faces frozen as they listened to what he had to say. Then, as one, the officers all bowed, broke ranks, and started barking out orders to the guards themselves, who hopped to whatever they were being told to do. Gar kept watching the towers for movement, figuring they were going to finish what the officers had started on a mass-production basis. The colonel, if that’s what he was, never so much as looked at the groups of prisoners. He did glance up one time toward the south, where the very tops of that towering cloud were just starting to feel the effects of the high-altitude winds. Now it looked even farther away than when the explosion first occurred. The colonel walked over to the commandant, helped him to his feet, and led him into the office building. The prisoners were left standing alone on the assembly ground, fearfully eyeing the machine-gun towers.

In fifteen minutes all the Japanese soldiers, including the clerks, were trotting down toward the main gates, carrying what looked like all their field gear. They started boarding the trucks waiting outside. Even the tower guards had climbed down and joined the exodus, much to the relief of the prisoners. A team of six soldiers went into the storehouse and dragged out burlap sacks of rice, which they hustled down to one of the trucks. One of the bags broke, and they just kicked it aside. The prisoners continued to stand there in their segregated groups. Nobody wanted to draw any attention to himself from anyone at all. Once the troops had boarded the trucks, the senior officer came out of the commandant’s office building and approached the five-man groups.

“Senior One,” he barked. Gar looked over at Willingham, who was still lying on his side, his hands cupping his bleeding head. Gar stepped forward, brought himself to attention, and saluted, taking care not to look him in the face.

“You stay here,” the officer said. “Close gates. Stay here. You go outside, you die. Stay here.”

Gar nodded once. He didn’t quite bow, but he kept his head down, looking at the ground. He pressed his trembling palms into his sides, not wanting to show this officer how afraid he was. The officer nodded back at Gar in that sharp, up-and-down head motion they used. Then he turned and started walking toward his waiting jeep. At that moment a single shot was heard coming from inside the commandant’s building. The colonel stopped, put his hands at his sides, bowed deeply once in the direction of the office, and then got into his jeep. The vehicle drove slowly down toward the gates and assumed its position in front of the column of trucks. Then the whole convoy simply drove away. As best the prisoners could tell, they were alone in the camp.

THIRTY-THREE

Gar asked two guys to go down and shut those gates before the local population figured out that they were unguarded. Whatever the hell had happened to Hiroshima City and now Nagasaki was apparently grounds for killing every POW within reach. For the next few hours they organized to secure the camp. Several men checked the buildings to make sure all the Japs had left. Two Brits helped Senior One into the barracks building. Gar and Dr. Morris went into the commandant’s office, where they found exactly what they expected to find. Gar liberated the commandant’s pistol and then set up a detail to get the Aussie and the commandant’s body down to the crematorium building. The prisoners who went up the towers reported large crowds in the street outside the walls, but they were not agitated, just standing out there, staring at that enormous cloud on the southern horizon as it bent lazily off to the west, pursued now by much blacker smoke beneath. The guards had left the permanently mounted machine guns in the towers, but no ammo. Gar made a mental note to search for some.

They checked the three storehouses and found that the Japs had taken every scrap of food, leaving only that one broken 50-pound sack of rice behind in the dirt. They salvaged every grain of it, and a detail went into the cookhouse to get some water going. Within the hour each of them had finished an entire bowl of rice, their first real food in two days. Senior One then called a meeting with all the officers in the camp to reorganize themselves now that the Japs had pulled out. Willingham had been injured more severely than Gar thought, but he was able to speak, and Gar didn’t want to “relieve” him if that was avoidable. He was a Brit, and most of the inmates were also Brits.

Gar volunteered to put himself in charge of the organizing effort, subject to Senior One’s approval. Willingham waved that off and asked Gar to simply take charge. Two British infantry majors took on perimeter security. They stationed men in the three towers, dressed from the waist up in what they hoped looked like Jap uniform gear. Their job was to man the machine guns and move the barrels around occasionally to make it look like the camp was still guarded. A second detail went up on the roof of the main barrack to repaint POW and add NEED FOOD on the roof in 20-foot-high letters. The “paint” was made by mixing lime from the crematorium with some used motor oil. In the meantime they all made copious use of the Japs’ bathing facilities, although there was no fuel to heat water. Gar sent a team into the mine to see if there were any signs of life from the trapped night-shift miners. The team came back shaking their heads.

The recce flights began that afternoon, both over Hiroshima City and farther south. Senior One thought that the departure of the prison camp’s staff meant that things finally might be coming to an end after those two gigantic explosions. Nobody wanted to voice the other possibility, that new guards were inbound. Two of the radiomen had managed to get the broadcast radio in the commandant’s office up and running, although it wasn’t very useful given that none of the POWs were fluent in Japanese. There was still a steady stream of people coming up over the ridge from Hiroshima City that evening and throughout the next five days. Those who could walk were all helping burn victims who could not, and after a while the prisoners stopped looking through the seams. Men, women, children of all ages, and even some household dogs trudged sorrowfully past the camp, headed generally north and away from whatever horrors lay just over the ridge.

On the fifth day after the Nagasaki explosion the rice ran out. Senior One met with his officer council again, and it was decided that they had to go out into the surrounding town to see if they could get food. As they were meeting, one of the radiomen stepped in and said that there was funereal music coming over the government radio and that the announcer sounded really excited. The tower guards reported that the town’s residents were coming out into the streets outside the camp and that they appeared to be falling into ranks on the sidewalks. As they hurried to look through the cracks they could see hundreds of civilians standing along the streets, but not a single military uniform. There were loudspeakers wired up to telephone poles at the street corners, and the same music was coming out of them. The POWs speculated quietly; they wondered if there’d been another sun-bomb, as some of the guys were calling it. Hiroshima City, Nagasaki, and now perhaps one of the bigger cities in the north? Or were the Japanese simply expecting some other overwhelming event to land on them? Then they heard the sound of planes coming.

The people in the street were peering up into the sky apprehensively, but this didn’t sound like the one of the big bomber formations. A moment later two U.S. Navy carrier planes came overhead at about 1,000 feet. Gar was pretty sure they were Corsairs. They weren’t carrying any external weapons, and one pilot had his canopy rolled back. They flew over the town and the coal yards, circled back, and came down lower, over the POW camp. The civilians outside stayed right where they were, displaying amazing self-discipline. The lead fighter waggled his wings at the POW group as he came over at 500 feet, and all of them cheered reflexively. He’d obviously seen the letters on the roof, and Gar thought they might be safer now that the Japs outside had also seen the fighters. Then they both flew up and over the ridge, dropping out of sight as they headed toward downtown Hiroshima City on the other side. The good news was that there weren’t any Jap planes pursuing them.

Once their engine noise subsided, they could hear the solemn music again. After a few minutes, it changed tone to something more like a fanfare, and then a different announcer came on. He spoke for a few minutes, then said something that made all the civilians outside come to attention and then bow their heads. Gar watched parents admonish their children to follow suit. The crowd went utterly quiet, so quiet that they could again hear those two fighters growling around beyond the ridge. Then a voice began intoning something in a high, singsong stream of Japanese. Everyone in the crowd bowed even lower, and most of them had their eyes shut. The POWs wondered what they were being told; whatever it was had to be pretty serious news, based on the way the people were reacting. When the weird singing voice finally stopped, the civilians straightened back up and began to disperse into their homes and shops. Everyone on the streets was visibly upset, with many people openly weeping.

The prisoners looked at each other with disbelief. Could it be? Could it possibly be? Was this goddamned war finally, finally, over?