Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  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 cam
p 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.