The Samurai Inheritance

V

Signals Lieutenant Tomoyuki Hamasuna of the Imperial Japanese Army carefully plucked the hooked thorn from his faded green uniform shirt and pushed through the almost impenetrable wall of bushes and vegetation. To his left and right he could hear the other members of his twelve-man patrol cursing softly as they struggled to keep station in the thick jungle. Sweat soaked his peaked cloth cap and streamed down his face, the coarse material of the shirt stuck to his flesh and the pack over his shoulder chafed everywhere it touched. He would never have admitted it to anyone for fear of ridicule, but Hamasuna found the jungle an oppressive assault on the senses. The relentless buzz of clouds of black flies and countless stinging insects filled his ears, the air around him stank of decay and damp and the foliage was like a green curtain that wrapped itself around him to the point of suffocation. He tightened his grip on his pistol. The atmosphere wasn’t the only intimidating thing about the jungle. It wouldn’t be the first time a small patrol like this had been attacked by the filthy blacks who inhabited these islands at the instigation of their white masters.

Hamasuna had been searching for three torturous hours since he’d been alerted to the smoke the sentries had spotted from his little outpost at Aku, east of the former Catholic mission station at Buin. They reported a crashed plane south of the Buin road down towards Moila Point. Whether Japanese or American it was vital that it be checked for survivors and possible intelligence.

An hour later he was almost ready to give up when his nostrils detected a different combination of scents: aviation fuel and the distant, but still acrid smell of burning.

‘Chūi, sā! Kono hōhōdesu.’

The warning cry came from his left side and made Hamasuna’s heart hammer in his chest. He stumbled blindly through the bushes towards its source, shouting to the men on his right flank to follow and form a perimeter.

It wasn’t a clearing as such, more a scar in the jungle canopy and it took time to work out what he was seeing. He’d half expected an American plane from one of the formations that pounded Rabaul every day, but the little he could see was clearly Japanese. Some kind of bomber? One part of the jungle revealed the camouflage green and silver bar of a wing propped against the bole of a large tree, as if carefully laid aside by a giant hand, the blood-red roundel of the Hinomaru almost obscured by leaves. A few metres further and the bitter smell of petroleum filled his nostrils to the exclusion of all else. Amongst blackened grass and torn branches, the dark eye of a Type 99 cannon glared out from the wreckage of the plane’s tail assembly. He noted that the inside of the perspex turret almost identically matched the hue of the Hinomaru, evidence of the certain fate of its occupant. Beyond the tail, scattered across a scorched patch of earth and surrounded by splintered branches, lay three more bodies, crushed and broken. One of them was headless and their limp, boneless poses were indicative of a condition only permitted the recently dead.

Lieutenant Hamasuna approached them. Something wasn’t right here. His mind registered the main fuselage and one engine on a truncated, still attached, second wing, but his unease grew as he studied the uniforms of the dead men. Not air force uniforms, but navy. Tailored uniforms, with the insignia of high-ranking officers. This wasn’t a bomber, but a transport: a transport carrying important people. His breath caught in his chest. It must be reported. Hamasuna fought off panic as he tried to come to a decision. He knew he should secure the crash site, but logic told him not to split his patrol. He had few enough as it was to fight off an ambush and if he left two or three behind the likelihood was he’d return to find them with their throats slit. No. He must leave everything exactly as it was and return to Aku to call for help. But first he had to search the entire area for possible survivors.

He was drawn to the fuselage. What other secrets did it contain? Not the pilots who would have fought to bring the plane down safely even in this impossible terrain. They would still be in the crushed and shattered nose on the far side of the clearing. Despite the smoke he judged it safe to move closer. Whatever fires had been caused by the crash had long since burned out. He walked down the side of the plane, taking in the shattered windows, the bright silver splashes where cannon shells had torn through the metal. Then, from the very corner of his eye, he saw him.

Tomoyuki Hamasuna had served in Manchuria. He had seen death in every form and on countless occasions, but no individual death had affected him as this one did. His whole body started to shake. The man still strapped upright in his aircraft seat was instantly recognizable. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto sat with his head slumped forward as if deep in thought. His gloved left hand rested on the hilt of his ceremonial sword, the index and middle fingers empty of the digits he had lost at the battle of Tsushima. Hamasuna took a few hesitant steps until he stood over the still figure. The right hand dangled by the side of the seat, a broken length of thin chain hanging from the wrist. A bloodstained exit wound in the front of the admiral’s dress jacket indicated he’d been hit in the back. Dried blood streaked the right side of his face from a second wound above the eye. Belatedly, Hamasuna realized he hadn’t breathed for more than a minute and he gulped in a mouthful of fetid, fuel-heavy air. His hand reached out slowly to touch the pale neck above the collar, and he flinched as he felt the chill flesh. No sign of a pulse. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, father of the Japanese navy and victor of Pearl Harbor, was dead.

Hamasuna stepped back and bowed from the waist, pausing for a moment to say a silent prayer. When he finished paying his respects he collected his thoughts, consulted his compass and called his men together.

‘Sugino? Check the cockpit for signs of life,’ he ordered. ‘Murayama? Take the point. This way. Back to the road. We will blaze a trail so that we can find our way directly back to the crash site.’

‘Is that—’

‘Obey orders,’ Hamasuna snarled. ‘You saw a crashed plane. Nothing more. If I hear a single word before the official announcement I will have every one of you transferred to the tiniest fly speck in the Pacific. Understand?’

‘Hai!’

As they prepared to leave the clearing he noticed a leather briefcase lying in the thick grass ten feet from Yamamoto’s body. It was old and battered, made of unusual heavy hide, and blackened by fire. He moved to pick it up, but thought better of it. He imagined the wrath of his superiors if he tampered with the scene. More sensible to leave it exactly as he found it. The soldiers filed out of the crash site, hacking a way through the thick jungle.

Hamasuna waited until they were out of sight, struggling against the instinct that drew him back to the briefcase that had been attached to the admiral’s wrist. Surely one look would not matter? He bent over the scorched leather and reached for the straps. A few minutes later he cast a last dejected glance at Yamamoto’s body and followed his men down the track.

The Japanese had been gone for only a few minutes when a shadow moved in the bush to the south of the clearing.

It took another hour for the patrol to return to the main track and they doubled along it until they reached the camouflaged tents and grass huts at Aku. Hamasuna shrugged off his fatigue and ran to the radio hut where he breathlessly ordered the operator to call headquarters at Rabaul. Taking a pencil between shaking fingers he put together a coded message: ‘Found crashed G4M tail no 323 south-west Aku stop No survivors stop Await instructions stop’.

‘Send it,’ he snapped. The operator tapped out the unit’s call sign and then the message. He darted apprehensive glances over his shoulder as Hamasuna paced the little hut for twenty minutes waiting for the answer. Without warning the distinctive Morse signal echoed tinnily through the headphones. Hamasuna froze as the operator began writing.

‘Well?’

‘I must decode it, sir.’

‘Then be quick about it.’

He looked over the man’s shoulder as the words began to form. ‘Secure … crash … site … await … senior … naval … presence …’ There was a pause, as if the sender was awaiting instructions, then: ‘ensure … nothing … moved … stop’.

‘Acknowledge.’ Hamasuna threw the order over his shoulder as he darted out of the door already shouting for his men to reform with enough rations for three days. He left one man as guide for the ‘senior naval presence’ and hurried the rest back to the crashed plane.

As he made his way through the jungle for the third time that day, Lieutenant Hamasuna felt a griping in his guts that had nothing to do with the fact that all he’d eaten since breakfast was a handful of rice. Should he have secured the site with ten men and sent two back with the message? No, he was certain he’d done the right thing. He knew he was a man of little imagination, that was why he was still only a junior lieutenant at thirty, but he was methodical. The priority had been to inform headquarters about Yamamoto. Everything else was secondary to that fact. In any case, what was worth stealing? His heart stopped as he remembered the white-gloved hand resting on the sword hilt. Yamamoto’s sword. What if …?

‘Faster,’ he barked, breaking into a trot. ‘Get your lazy arses moving.’

They reached the crash almost before Hamasuna realized it and the first thing he did was rush to the admiral’s corpse. With a surge of relief he saw the sword was still in place. He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. When he opened them again they strayed towards the patch of scorched grass where the briefcase had lain.

It was gone.