The Year of Counting Souls

by Wallace, Michael

  Mori drew his sword. The injured soldier flinched, Captain Soto squawked, and Fujiwara stiffened. Mori waved around his pistol with slight provocation, but he had only drawn his guntō once in anger, and that had ended with blood. A Chinese peasant spat on a Japanese flag and lost his head for it. Fujiwara would be remembering that incident, too, and that made Mori pause, check his anger.

  “My brother is not a traitor,” Mori managed through clenched teeth. “I will kill any man who says he is.”

  And yet he is. Isn’t he?

  The injured man was trembling as he stared at the sword. He pulled the gauze from his mouth. “I beg your pardon, sir. Many, many pardons. I did not mean that.”

  He was trying to speak precisely, but he had an ugly country accent, and where his tongue slipped past his missing teeth, the words came out slurred and drunk sounding. The remnants of Mori’s anger turned to disgust, and he lowered the point of the sword.

  “He was on the hood of the enemy truck, sir. He flew up there when they hit his bike. They drove off with him stuck to the windshield. Nobody knew if he was dead or alive.”

  “Are you telling me the Americans got away?” Mori asked, incredulous, turning to Soto. “They drove through an entire company of your men and nobody bothered to kill them? How many trucks were there?”

  “I’m not sure. Three?”

  “Two, sir,” the injured man said. “Yes, they escaped. We were told not to pursue them.”

  “Who told you that?” Mori demanded.

  “I did,” Soto said. “We have few trucks, and we couldn’t have hunted them down with bicycles.”

  “Few trucks is different than no trucks. Did you radio for planes? Did you warn your colonel there were enemy elements behind your lines?”

  “The Americans looped back around,” Soto said. “Turned up along a country road so they could bypass the city and get north. Probably a mistake that they were headed this way in the first place. I wouldn’t worry about them, sir. They seemed to be hospital trucks evacuating Manila.”

  “It’s amazing how clear your memory has become,” Mori said.

  “Did you say he’s your brother? I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know that’s who you were looking for.” Soto seemed genuinely contrite, but Mori thought it was an act. “And I didn’t know we’d never found him. Maybe he’s up the road still. We could look. He might only be in the ditch, stunned.”

  Most of the traffic down the road since the incident with the Americans had been on foot or bicycle, except for a few light trucks carrying supplies or pulling carts laden with small field pieces. Mori was able to find the heavier tread of the American vehicles, and the scene of the mayhem when they’d barreled through the infantry. There were a few brass casings in the mud, but no evidence of a firefight. It was flat terrain and a straight road, and the IJA soldiers must have seen the trucks coming from a distance. They’d apparently managed no more than a few potshots before the enemy escaped.

  “It was hot and starting to rain,” Soto said lamely when questioned. “There were a lot of mosquitoes. We were singing a martial song to raise our spirits.”

  “Let me give you a lesson for the future,” Mori said. “When you heap one excuse on top of another, the entire story begins to stink. Now what was it? What really happened?”

  “I suppose we didn’t expect the Americans to attack. When I saw the trucks, I thought they must have been ours.”

  “They were driving the wrong way. How could they have been ours?”

  “That happens all the time,” Soto said. “Trucks get turned around, men march in the wrong direction. The battlefield is confusion. We come in with maps, which we try to read under fire. Sometimes you shoot at the wrong people—have you ever been in a firefight with your own army? Have you ever been bombed by your own planes? Until you have, I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  Mori’s instinct was to bristle, but Soto was probably right in this case. Two lone trucks rumbling up the road, unescorted, wouldn’t look like a threat. Not to a bunch of men on bicycles, heads hanging in the suffocating heat and tongues lolling like dogs’. The Americans might not have noticed, either, not until it was too late.

  The three men were driving slowly up the road, following the tire tracks of the American trucks, when Fujiwara hit the brakes. It was raining harder now, the road sloppy mud, and they slid to a stop. Fujiwara jumped out, and Mori followed. The rain fell harder with every passing moment, but Mori didn’t mind. It made him feel more alive.

  He snapped his fingers at Captain Soto to follow, only remembering when he saw the man’s confused frown that snapping was an American gesture. Something he’d carried with him from his time living among the enemy.

  “Get out.” Then, to Fujiwara, who was squatting in the road, “What is it, what do you see?”

  “Look, sir.”

  Mori looked but didn’t see at first what had drawn his adjutant’s attention. “I see boot prints. Tire tracks. Are you saying the Americans stopped here and got out? How can you be sure?”

  The lieutenant pointed. “These are big feet, and the pattern in the sole is different, see. These were Americans. For comparison, this is one of ours, over here. One of our soldiers got off his bike and stepped off the road, probably to take a piss. Do you see?”

  “All right, if you say so. What’s this?” Mori pointed to a long outline stretching through a muddy puddle—the tire tracks they’d been following since the field hospital crossed it. “What left this mark?”

  “A body pressed in the mud. Here’s the outline of a canteen. Looks like he was run over, whoever it was.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mori stared hard but didn’t see it. Not enough to be certain. Still, he trusted Fujiwara. The man’s eyes were sharp, but more than that, his ability to detect patterns was incredible.

  “He must have been carried along on top of the truck,” Fujiwara said, “then thrown off. Then they ran him over.”

  Captain Soto grunted. He stood back a pace, trying in vain to clean his glasses even as rain kept falling. “You can’t see all of that. Nobody could. If he was run over, where’s the body?”

  “That’s right,” Mori said. “There should be a body.”

  “Ah, look,” Fujiwara said. He moved over a few feet and squatted again. His boots sank into the mud, but he didn’t seem to notice. “A foot dragging here. Almost gone in this rain, but you can see it. Someone was helping him walk. Looks to me like they hauled your brother into the truck. He wasn’t walking under his own power, but he wasn’t carried, either.”

  “Then he’s alive?” Mori asked. Mixed emotions twisted in his gut.

  His adjutant stood up and gazed into the distance with a thoughtful expression. “That part is impossible to answer.”

  Yes, it could be that he was nearly dead, and they’d hauled his body into the truck so as to dump it later. Or it could be that they’d driven to some other location to shoot him and dispose of the body. That’s what Mori would have done had the situation been reversed. The Americans would soon enough end up prisoners of war, and they wouldn’t want to be tied to the incident on the road. Surely wouldn’t want to be seen executing an injured man, even if they knew it must be done.

  But Americans could be sentimental. They lacked the hard spirit so necessary in wartime. Like the time in Manchukuo when Mori had bloodied his sword on the neck of a Chinese peasant. He hadn’t wanted to, but these things were necessary, even desirable so as to spread an important message. So perhaps Sammy Mori was still alive.

  “You said the Americans turned around?” Mori asked Captain Soto.

  “Just south of here. They were spotted later by a recon plane trying to make their way north again. There’s another American hospital in Baliuag, and I figure that’s where they were headed. Don’t worry, sir, they’ll soon be in our hands.”

  Mori remembered what Soto had said about the Seventh Tank Regiment. The fleeing America
ns would be stumbling into an attack if they made it to Baliuag. He studied the man.

  The captain had the look of a wet dog as the rain made his hair run in soggy strings down the side of his face. His glasses were mud splattered, and he’d finally ceased attempting to clean them on his wet jacket. He looked up the road toward his troops, as if desperate to be away from these Kempeitai officers and back to his job fighting the war. Or waiting around until someone told him to fight, anyway.

  “This is a very grave situation,” Mori said.

  Soto turned. “What do you mean?”

  “Your behavior has been shameful.”

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” Soto said quickly, “but this is war, and these things happen. I’ve only been doing my duty, obeying orders.”

  “I’ve arrested many men who claimed they were only obeying orders. Men of higher rank and stature than yourself. I have broad powers, Captain Setsuko Soto, and I am going to exercise them now.” Mori nodded at Fujiwara.

  Fujiwara drew his sidearm and pointed it casually at Soto, who made a small sound in the back of his throat. He glanced desperately around him, but there was nobody on the road, nothing but Mori’s small truck, its engine rumbling. Rain plinked against the hood, suddenly as loud as a martial drumbeat.

  “All those men you have,” Mori said, “lounging about while other soldiers fight and die. I’m going to put them to good use. You, sir, are going to put them to use.”

  “But Colonel Matsui ordered me to—”

  “Feel free to complain once you’ve done your duty. Until then, your troops are mine, and they’re going to escort me to Baliuag to find Lieutenant Mori.”

  As Soto bowed to show his obedience, Mori reached into his jacket pocket to remove the three folded sheets of paper. He moved them quickly to an inner pocket where they’d be safe from the rain that was threatening to soak through. Fujiwara returned a grim nod when Mori met his gaze. The adjutant knew about the betrayal. Knew the purpose behind his captain’s search.

  Sammy. Why had he done it?

  You should have died on the road, brother, Mori thought. It would have been better for us both.

  Chapter Five

  Louise’s first inclination that something was wrong in Baliuag came from the flaming nipa huts on the outskirts of the town, their grass roofs lit up like torches in the late-afternoon sky. But there was no crush of civilians on the road, and Lieutenant Kozlowski apparently decided that the town was safely in American hands and ordered them to continue toward the hospital.

  They came upon American forces closer to the center of Baliuag, and here they learned the truth. Japanese tanks had rolled to the outskirts of town and were attempting to break through and sever the escape route to the Bataan Peninsula. Several buildings were on fire from supporting artillery fire.

  General Jones had ordered the 192nd Tank Battalion to hold the town at any cost. A colonel found out the Manila evacuees had medical supplies, and ordered them to take cover and set up a mobile hospital for the inevitable casualties. What about the hospital itself, Dr. Claypool asked. No, it was already overrun.

  That was the extent of their orders, so they were left groping forward into the center of town. The sound of shells and small-arms fire sounded both to their front and rear, and Kozlowski ordered them into a courtyard of sunken paving stones between two stucco Spanish-style buildings. They’d just parked the trucks when the battle started up in the street outside.

  Louise and her fellow nurses evacuated the injured patients into one of the buildings, among them the injured Japanese soldier. A shell whistled in and detonated on the roof, and people threw themselves to the ground as plaster and broken tiles rained down. Clarice was shaking and crying, unable to get herself up without help, but Frankie finally shook off her whining and complaining and began ordering the other nurses around. There was some semblance to reason in her decisions, so Louise followed her lead, glad to have her back in command.

  The existing men needed care, but they soon took on additional patients. One was a soldier with a gaping calf wound, followed shortly by three civilians who’d been caught in the crossfire. Frankie assisted Dr. Claypool in surgery while the other three nurses attended to everyone else. The most critical need was morphine. Louise and Maria Elena used a pressure-pumped Bunsen burner to boil water in the open courtyard, with which they sterilized needles, then used the hot water to dissolve morphine tablets. Clarice, white faced and silent, went inside the makeshift recovery ward to give injections.

  The sound of battle grew louder until it was shaking the buildings. Frankie cried out for more gauze, and Louise went out to the rear truck to get some. The back of the vehicle was empty except for discarded boots and crutches, their crates of medical supplies, and a single duffel bag holding the few personal belongings the soldiers had been allowed to take from the hospital.

  She found the gauze and hopped down from the back of the truck with her arms full. Only a few feet from the street now, she froze as a tank rumbled up with the clank of tracks and the stink of burning fuel and powder rolling off it. White letters on green: “USA.” An American soldier crouched behind a machine gun at the rear, staring forward behind his gun shield.

  Louise felt as though she were caught in a powerful magnetic pull, and she took five steps out to the gap between the two buildings protecting the courtyard, unable to help herself. There she stood on the edge of the street, arms laden with rolls of white gauze.

  The building across the street burned. Two more wooden nipa huts lit up like torches farther down. A palm tree sprawled across the road, its trunk like a severed finger pointing at the sky. Electric wires sparked from a pole. The soldier on the back of the tank poured fire from his machine gun at something in the burning building. The tank turret rotated. There was another American tank coming up behind it, and its turret, too, was rotating in the same direction. Louise’s gaze turned with them.

  And there it was, another tank, somewhat smaller than the first, with a white star on it. No, there were two tanks. Three! All rolling in this direction, about seventy yards away, but closing. The farther American tanks fired at the newcomers. Then the closer one followed. Louise’s eardrums ached at the earsplitting boom.

  The first shell missed. The second smashed into the lead Japanese tank and exploded. Its top popped off, and flames shot out. Someone burst from the fire and threw himself to the ground. He was burning alive, screaming, but his agony didn’t last long before the American machine gunner cut him down.

  Then the Japanese were returning fire. One shell flew high and detonated in the second story of a nearby building, and a second slammed into the American tank but bounced off without exploding and flew into the wall of the building in front of Louise, some thirty or forty feet away. Only seconds had passed since she’d stepped out toward the street, and she remained fixed in place, like she was watching a movie or a scene from a dream. None of this was real.

  How curious, she thought as she looked at the Japanese shell sticking out of the building. A fluke of battle, one shell goes off, the other that fails to—

  The shell detonated. There was a flash of light, and Louise was flying backward. A moment of blackness, and when she began to come around, she was startled to find birds flying around her face, batting her with their wings. White birds, black birds. Birds on fire.

  Someone shouted at her. Hands grabbed her. More shouting. The words sounded like they were coming down to her at the bottom of a well. Why were they so angry? The birds settled to the ground around her, and now she saw that they were gauze, blown out of her hands in the blast. Some of the pieces were burning.

  A woman dragged Louise back into the courtyard, and though she was still stunned, she recognized Frankie’s angry, frightened face.

  “You fool. What are you doing?” Frankie still sounded muffled, like she was speaking through a pillow. Louise wasn’t deaf; there was that to be thankful for.

  Louise shook her head. She couldn’t
say. What had possessed her? What in God’s name had made her step into the street to watch a tank battle and to stand there like an idiot, to stare at the Japanese shell, waiting for it to explode? If it had detonated against the American tank, she’d have been killed by shrapnel. If it had bounced in a different direction, there would be nothing left of her but red mist and bone fragments.

  The battle raged in the street outside for several minutes before it moved on. A pair of infantrymen told her the American counterattack had been a complete success and had pushed the Japanese out of the center of town. But Baliuag was on fire, the hospital destroyed, and the Japanese would soon be back in greater force. They were ordered to evacuate toward Bataan as soon as the road was secure.

  A few minutes before nightfall, a pair of Japanese planes came and dropped bombs. When the ruckus had died down, two infantrymen came to tell Lieutenant Kozlowski to prepare the trucks. The lieutenant had been trying to radio for orders during the battle but was unable to get to his superiors, and now he seemed pleased to be working again with a purpose.

  The sound of men crying in pain cut through the evening air as they were hauled out on sheets of corrugated metal, planks of wood, and other improvised stretchers. American trucks and tanks prowled the streets outside the compound, and with them came voices calling out in English and Tagalog.

  Once the lieutenant had ordered the ambulatory patients to begin reloading the trucks, he and Dr. Claypool stood in the courtyard having an urgent conversation in low tones. This continued for several minutes until the doctor called over his four nurses. Louise looked back and forth between the two men, curious as to what this was all about.

  “Go ahead and tell them,” Kozlowski said.

  “We can’t go to Bataan,” Dr. Claypool said. “Most of these men shouldn’t be moved at all. That burned fellow, for example. And there’s that navy ensign in really bad shape—we’re lucky he hasn’t died already.”