The Year of Counting Souls

by Wallace, Michael

  “There’s no road,” she said.

  “No,” Dr. Claypool said.

  “No back door out of Sanduga for the Bataan Peninsula. No way out except back down the mountain the way we came.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “You’ve been here before. You knew already.”

  “I did. I knew it all along. This was a one-way trip.”

  She glanced at the lieutenant. “And you knew, too? Or did the doctor lie to you as well?”

  “Dr. Claypool told me before we left Baliuag,” Kozlowski said. “Before we spoke to the nurses, in fact. I knew already. I received my orders, Claypool and I consulted, and we decided to lie to you girls.”

  Louise remembered the urgent words between the two men before Claypool called them over. The significant glances, the feeling they were hiding something.

  “I don’t understand. Why would you lie?”

  “The lie wasn’t for your ears so much as the other nurses’,” Claypool said. “You were an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Think about how Miss Frankie acted out. Her attitude was poor. Self-centered and cowardly. Now imagine if she knew there was no back door out of the village that would get us to Bataan, that once we got up here there would be no escape. How would she have responded?”

  “Not very well,” Louise said.

  “She’d have had a mental breakdown at a time when we needed calm,” Claypool said. “That’s why we lied to her and carried on that charade about letting the nurses have a say. To a lesser extent, we were lying to Miss Clarice and Miss Maria Elena, too.”

  “You could have told me,” she said. “Why didn’t you?”

  “We think you can be trusted, but we’re not sure,” Kozlowski said. “Can you?”

  “What do you mean, trusted? Trusted with what?”

  “Not to panic,” Kozlowski said.

  “I’m not the panicking type. What are we doing here? Will one of you tell me what’s going on?”

  “I’d have said that about all of you a few weeks ago,” Dr. Claypool said. “None of you were given to panic.”

  “That was before Pearl Harbor,” she said, “before the Japanese started bombing the Philippines. We didn’t really expect war.”

  Lieutenant Kozlowski grunted. “Men, planes, artillery, full tank battalions—that’s just what the army sent us since September. What did you think, it was all for show?”

  “Deterrence,” she said. “So the Japs wouldn’t get any ideas.”

  “The evidence was there,” Kozlowski said. “You’d have to be blind not to see it.”

  “Anyway, that’s no excuse for what I’ve seen,” Claypool said. “Look at Miss Frankie. Head nurse, years of experience, and she’s right on the edge.”

  “She’s still good in surgery,” Louise said.

  “And a mess the rest of the time. As for the others, Miss Clarice is a child, Miss Maria Elena is a Pinoy, and every day she’ll be thinking she can slip away and hide herself in the civilian population.”

  “No, she won’t. I’ll concede the other two, but Maria Elena is steady.”

  “Maybe she is, maybe she’s not,” the doctor said. “But you’re the one I’m going to, the one to keep your head, to make sure the nurses work, the men stay comfortable, and the hospital is clean. All of the dozens of things that I need to keep functioning.”

  “I can manage the girls,” Louise said. “But as for keeping the hospital functioning, we don’t have a fraction of what we need. Quinine and morphine for a start. We have a little bit—whatever we shoved in the truck—but it won’t last. We’ve got mounds of aspirin and bicarbonate of soda, for all the good that will do us.”

  “Take a closer look at those jars next time you’re digging through supplies,” Dr. Claypool said. “The useless stuff is mislabeled on purpose, in case the enemy got to it. You have everything you need to run this hospital for months.”

  “Months.” Her voice sounded hollow. “Months?”

  “Maybe longer. Let’s call it indefinitely.”

  “I still don’t understand.” She looked at the doctor, then to the lieutenant. “Why? Please tell me.”

  “War was coming,” Kozlowski said. “We’ve been fortifying the islands the best we could with what little the army gave us. But we knew what would happen if the Japs came, and we’ve made contingency plans.”

  “You don’t think Bataan will hold?” she asked. “Corregidor? They’re fortresses, they can hold out for reinforcements. That’s what everyone says.”

  “How long do you suppose it will take to build a navy to replace the one at the bottom of Pearl Harbor?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Neither do I, but it won’t be soon, Miss Louise,” Lieutenant Kozlowski said. “And until that happens, there won’t be any reinforcements. That means Bataan falls, Corregidor, too. Even if they don’t fall, we have our orders.”

  “What orders?” Louise said. “I want to know what and why. That’s all I’m asking. Stop holding back information. What are we doing here?”

  “We’re a hospital,” Dr. Claypool said. “We heal the wounded. For now, the men we brought with us, but in the future . . .” He shrugged.

  “In the future?” She was still confused.

  “Partisans,” Kozlowski said.

  “There are partisans already?”

  “There will be,” he said with a nod. “Filipino soldiers, Americans caught behind enemy lines. Even bandits, if they’ll kill Japs for us. Anyone taking to the mountains to stay out of the reach of the enemy. We’ll give them support, get the wounded back into the fight.”

  “I see.” Her thoughts ran over her patients and stopped at Sammy Mori. “What about the Japanese soldier? He’s immobile with that cast, but he’ll heal. What will you do with him?”

  “We can’t let him go,” the lieutenant said. “I’m sure you know that.”

  “We can’t kill him, either.” She looked at the doctor. “Right? Dr. Claypool?”

  Claypool looked troubled. “Our job is to heal the sick and injured. I won’t do any killing, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “We’re not permitting others to do it, either. That’s pretty much the same thing. Lieutenant? Promise me you won’t hurt him.”

  The expression on Kozlowski’s face was harder to read. “The Jap is no threat for now. When Mori can walk again, we’ll see.”

  The two men fell silent, and she turned away from them, her mind churning. Stumpy had found something nasty in the grass lining the road and was gnawing it with great relish.

  “So,” the lieutenant said after several long moments. “I hope you won’t be any trouble.”

  Louise remembered the poem the Japanese soldier had recited. Or composed—she wasn’t sure which. He’d been studying the lizards and insects on the wall. Noticing. She could notice, too.

  When Mori can walk again, we’ll see.

  “We have our orders,” she said. “Assuming you’re telling me the truth, I will do my duty.”

  Both men nodded, and the doctor said, “I told you we could count on her,” to which the lieutenant grunted but looked satisfied.

  “We can’t hide this from the others,” Louise said. “Not for long.”

  Kozlowski eyed her. “No, we can’t. But I’m not ready for everyone to know, not yet.”

  “You know them best, Miss Louise,” Dr. Claypool said. “Any suggestions?”

  “The first step is to keep them from coming out this far. They’re not stupid. If they see all this”—she waved her hand at the road where it turned into a cow path—“they’re going to figure it out in a hurry. Could you make up a story about the road being mined or something? That might hold them in the village.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Kozlowski said. “Let me think up something.”

  There were so many other questions she wanted to ask, but at that moment a familiar whine came fro
m the sky, and the three of them hurled themselves into the grass.

  Louise was lying face-to-face with Stumpy as the airplane approached. The dog kept working at his prize, a pig’s foot and the lower part of its leg bone. He nosed one end of the leg toward her, as if offering her the other side to chew on.

  “You’re too kind,” she said. “But no thanks.”

  The engine grew louder, and Louise looked skyward. A slow-moving scout plane flew overhead. On its wings, the familiar and hated round red spot, like a fried egg. She held her breath as it passed over the village, waiting for it to spot the trucks beneath their camouflage netting, but it flew on without slowing or wheeling back around. Lieutenant Kozlowski let out his breath beside her.

  They were apparently safe for now, but it was a taste of what was to come. Retreat into the mountains and take their place among the partisans and more of the same would follow. Hiding in the grass, waiting for that inevitable moment when the Japanese discovered them.

  Chapter Nine

  Baliuag stank of defeat when Yoshiko Mori entered the town several days after the battle. He’d finally dismissed Captain Soto’s men and sent them back to terrorize Manila, which was under Japanese control at last.

  For two days, he’d tried to push his way to the small town where his brother was presumed to have gone, only to be turned back by enemy snipers, by petulant Japanese commanders, and even by muddy, impassable roads. Of these, the opposition from his own side was the most galling, and he’d finally radioed his superiors to complain. Still more stonewalling. The trail felt cold when Lieutenant Fujiwara finally drove them into the village, except for word of a promising Filipino prisoner who had fallen into army hands.

  As for Baliuag, Mori was unimpressed with the strutting soldiers holding it. Not with so many dead tanks remaining in the streets, their turrets blasted off, their tracks slipped as they were hit by enemy rounds. One lay on its side like a dead buffalo, and smelled just as bad, too; apparently nobody had bothered to remove the charred soldiers inside, and they were now rotting in the tropical heat. Mori counted eight destroyed tanks, all Japanese.

  The rising tide of imperial power had been sweeping across Southeast Asia for the past month, but here it had met resistance. The Americans had held long enough to keep their lines from being severed while they fled west toward Bataan.

  Mori stopped at the Spanish-style building at the center of town where the commanding officer had made his headquarters. It was the most impressive structure in Baliuag—or had been at one time. Three stories with a tile roof and an upper balcony. Now the shutters were blown off, the balcony half-collapsed, and the rising sun flag hung limply, waiting for a breeze.

  A squat, toad-like officer with the insignia of major stood outside smoking when the truck pulled up. This must be Major Noguchi, the one who’d been delaying him. There was a large bamboo tub of dirty water in front of him, and two soldiers were drowning a half-naked young man in it. They let him up when the two Kempeitai got out of the truck. One of the locals. The man jabbered in Tagalog, eyes wide with terror, until the soldiers pushed him back under.

  Other soldiers, not paying much attention to the drowning Filipino, sat on mats on the side of the street, drinking miso soup and shoveling rice and fish from their bowls with chopsticks.

  The major eyed the newcomers as they approached, fixing especially on Fujiwara’s armband reading “Law Police.” He turned to Mori.

  “Captain Mori, I suppose?”

  “That’s right. Major Noguchi?”

  “Hai.” The major waved his hand at the soldiers. “Bring him up again. We don’t want him dead. Not yet.”

  He chuckled at this, as if it were a rather clever joke, and there was something in his narrow, stupid eyes that made Mori instinctively hate the man. He had no idea why they were torturing the prisoner, and assumed there was more to it than petty cruelty, but the pleasure in it was unseemly, like a child sneering as he pulled the legs off a grasshopper.

  “The rest of you, get inside.” Noguchi waited until the grumbling soldiers had collected their mats and bowls and gone into the building, then turned back to Mori. “So you’re looking for your brother.”

  “That’s right. I have reason to believe he came this way.”

  “So do I, Mori. So do I. That’s why I let you through, even though I should have turned you back for your own good. This is a war zone, after all, and not safe for your kind.”

  “My kind?”

  Noguchi chuckled, clearly delighted to have irritated the Kempeitai officer. Was this another case of gekokujō, the ignoring of proper chain of command?

  “Yes, your kind, Mori. We’re fighting Americans here, not terrorizing dumb peasants. You don’t understand war—you’ll only put yourself at risk.” The major sighed in an especially patronizing way. “But one has a duty to one’s own brother, I suppose.”

  Noguchi was wrong, of course. It wasn’t looking after his brother that had brought Mori; it was the opposite. It was about stopping that brother before more of his stupidity spread to the wider world. That was both Mori’s duty and what might save him from the repercussions of Sammy’s behavior.

  The major glanced over at his men, who were holding the half-drowned young Filipino without showing the least bit of initiative. “Well, what are you waiting for? Give him his bath.” Then, to Mori, “What do you think it’s like, fighting Americans? You think it’s a stroll in the cherry blossoms?”

  Mori gave a significant look at the burned-out Japanese tank across the street. “It looks like the Americans gave you everything you could handle.”

  Noguchi grunted. “You’d have been pissing your trousers if you’d been here. There’s not a one of you law police who knows how to fight. Bunch of cowards.”

  There was no point in arguing the matter, of explaining that both Mori and his adjutant had seen brutal fighting in China. Noguchi would only point out that this fight was different, that these were Americans, or otherwise belittle Mori’s combat experience in an attempt to sidetrack him from his objective.

  “Lieutenant Fujiwara,” Mori said. “Major Noguchi has made an interesting observation, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, sir.” Fujiwara took out his notebook and began writing in it. “Unusual, but illuminating.”

  Noguchi’s eyes narrowed. “What’s he scribbling there? What’s this about?”

  “The corporal is recording your thoughts. They might prove helpful later when we’re asked about your cooperation. Now about this information you supposedly have.”

  Mori had been hoping that the major would prove as pliable as Captain Soto, but Noguchi seemed uncowed. He put his hands on his waist and stared piggishly.

  “I’ll help you, but it will cost you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I have information. You’re looking for your brother. This is no important mission, it’s about your duty. Well, I respect that, Mori. I really do. But you’re asking me for army resources to clear up a family matter. And I need some resources in return to pay for it. We’re short on critical supplies, and I need your help.”

  “I have no access to armaments,” Mori said.

  This was not entirely true. The military police had broad powers, especially in occupied areas, which Manila had officially become. They’d captured numerous fuel depots and ammunition dumps. If Noguchi needed something to keep pressing toward the Americans on Bataan, Mori could make it happen, assuming his commanding officer, Colonel Umeko, allowed it.

  “I’m not short on armaments,” the major said. “Those aren’t the supplies I need.”

  “What is it, food, clothing?”

  “Oh no, we’ve got all of that. Well, supplies are adequate, at least.” He turned to his soldiers, who were dunking their prisoner with a little too much enthusiasm again. “You idiots, you’re going to kill him. That’s right, bring him up, let him breathe.”

  The two men held up the young man, who was slumping, nearly unconsc
ious. One of them struck the prisoner on the back, and he coughed up water. The soldiers slapped him and shouted until he steadied himself without falling.

  “Morale is slipping,” Major Noguchi said, paying no attention to the abuse of his prisoner. “That’s the truth. Three weeks of hard fighting, and we’ve barely had a rest. I’m sure the boys in Manila are having a good time and all, but it’s tough out here on the front.”

  “Not as good a time as you would think,” Mori said. “There are plenty of foreigners in the city, Red Cross observers and the like. They’re watching. We can’t have any incidents like in China. That’s the official word. So the men must be kept in line.”

  “I suppose so. But a good hunting dog needs to be thrown a bone now and then.”

  “What is it you’re looking for?” Mori asked cautiously. “Comfort women for your men?”

  “No, not that. We’ve got a brothel. Only four girls, but we’re putting them to work. Little brown things, boy, do they know how to . . . Look, Mori. Here’s the truth. I want some whiskey, and I want you to get it for me.”

  “You want whiskey?”

  “Something high quality, you understand, not that coconut slop. What do they call it? Lambanog. Tastes like distilled rubber sap. I need the good stuff.”

  “I’m not sure getting your troops liquored up is going to help the war effort,” Mori said.

  “Not for the common soldiers, only the officers. High quality, you understand. From what I understand, there were a bunch of foreign clubs down on the waterfront. Now, I’ve heard from General Homma that they kept the troops out and saved what they found for the officers. I want you to get me some of it.”

  Mori’s first reaction was disbelief, followed by outrage. How dare Major Noguchi make such demands? The Kempeitai had broad powers, and when a man like Mori declared that he was on official business, these common soldiers had better stand aside if they knew what was good for them.

  On the other hand, Noguchi was right, at least to a certain point. This business was personal, a search for his brother. It was a detail he’d let slip to Captain Soto, and now this major knew it as well. A hand touched the letter in his jacket pocket.