Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  “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.