The Samurai Inheritance

by James Douglas

  But Hamasuna’s efforts had come to nothing. On the morning the admiral left he’d stood shaking as his own commanding officer questioned his integrity, his competence and his loyalty in an interview that was as frightening for its remoteness as it was for the implied threat of summary justice. In the end, he felt fortunate to be transferred to the infantry and placed in charge of a company digging in on the Buin road against the imminent American invasion.

  Three years on they occupied the same stinking, airless bunker in the same stinking patch of jungle, only his ‘company’, which had started out with a hundred and fifty men, now numbered fewer than forty. The Americans had kept them waiting another six months before surprising General Hyakutake, Bougainville’s commander, with a landing at Empress Augusta Bay. Within hours the invaders had wiped out the bay’s few hundred defenders and established a bridgehead.

  By the end of November, despite desperate counter attacks by Seventeenth Army, the invaders had built an airfield capable of sending bombers to hit the main supply base at Rabaul. Unless the Americans could be thrown off the island, the Japanese garrison of Bougainville would eventually be starved out. For four months Hyakutake had contented himself with pinprick attacks, but in late March Hamasuna and his men had been roused from their bunker to take part in a full-scale counter-offensive.

  What followed was three weeks of terror, hunger, exhaustion and death as he and his comrades launched attack after attack against the American-defended hills protecting the bridgehead. They spent endless nights throwing themselves at the entrapping coils of barbed wire through an invisible wall of lead from the heavily dug-in positions. As the first waves were cut down, the survivors clawed their way over the bodies of the dead and wounded to grenade the dugouts and work themselves into the enemy trenches. Once through the wire it was bayonet to bayonet, knife to knife and man to man, screaming and hacking at the enemy until he was a bloody caricature of a human being. Then on to the next trench and the next, until only a visceral determination to survive – to live through this unbelievable horror and eventually return to his loved ones – gave a man the strength to lift his arm and strike the fatal blow. Daylight brought the inevitable bombs and artillery fire that shook the earth and turned the tree canopy into a blinding, eviscerating blizzard of shrapnel and splinters from torn branches. Soon it would be followed by the thunk-thunk-thunk of mortars that heralded a new barrage and the inevitable counterattack. Then it was your turn to cower in the trenches and fire your machine gun until the barrel became red hot, and the bodies were piled three deep across your front. In twenty-one days they took the same hill four times only to be driven off again. Not once had they come close to breaking the main American line. Eventually, even Hyakutake realized it could not be done and ordered a withdrawal. He’d started out with twenty thousand men. By the time he pulled out five thousand were dead, with three thousand wounded and no medical supplies to care for their injuries.

  Hamasuna and his depleted company had stumbled, exhausted, back through the jungle to their bunker complex overlooking the road, and waited for the inevitable counter-stroke. But the Americans, it seemed, were content to hold what they had. Instead of attacking they decided to allow the Japanese garrison to starve, which they duly did. For months Hamasuna had been kept alive by cups of watery rice eked out with stringy, bitter strips of vegetation and unwholesome squirming grubs the medical officer claimed were nourishing. Beriberi, dengue fever, malaria, typhus and a curious enervating, wasting disease that came in many forms that the men simply called jungle fever caused more casualties than the enemy in the miserable hunger months that followed. But all that changed when the barbarians came.

  The barbarians wore slouch hats and were aggressive even to each other. Since they had replaced the Americans five months earlier they had given Hamasuna and his men no rest. The barbarians patrolled by day and sent their cannibals by night. Half-starved and exhausted, each day that passed left the Japanese defenders weaker and less able to counter the constant probes and patrols by the Australians and their native allies. When General Hyakutake’s health began to fail he’d been replaced as commander of Seventeenth Army by General Matasane. With the enemy advancing steadily down the Buin road, Matasane decided he had only one course of action.

  Which was why Lieutenant Tomoyuki Hamasuna was preparing for his last day on earth.

  He’d been hoarding the paper and ink for this day and now he picked up the brush. His tired features creased in a frown of concentration that made the mix of dried sweat and dirt that coated his face fall away in tiny flakes.

  The first was easy. A simple farewell to his wife and his family that had been written several times already in this war, but he had a feeling this would be the last. Once he finished it, he carefully folded the paper and wrote the family address on the front. The second letter required more thought.

  ‘Not long now, sir … Oh, I apologize,’ Murayama turned away as he saw what his lieutenant was doing.

  Hamasuna ignored him and began writing, tentatively at first, but soon in bolder more confident strokes. ‘I Lieutenant Tomoyuki Hamasuna, 1st battalion, 45th Infantry regiment, 6th division, 17th Japanese Army wish to confess to a crime. On 18 April 1943, I was first to discover the crash site of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plane, south-west of Aku. I wish to state that I failed to report that the admiral was in possession of a briefcase, which I failed to secure, and subsequently lost to a native inhabitant. The contents of the briefcase contained the following information …’

  When he’d completed the letter he felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from him. He folded up the sheets, addressed it to General Kanda Matasane and placed it, along with the other, in the water-proof map case he had taken from a dead American. One last check of the thousand-stitch belt, a pull at his legging cloths, hands automatically testing the draw of his katana ceremonial sword and the flap of his holster. The other men in the bunker had finished their preparations and were waiting for him by the entrance. He met their eyes one by one and was gratified by the determination he saw despite their weakened state. ‘Banzai,’ he whispered and they chorused the word in reply. With a last glance at his watch he nodded and one by one they slipped out into the night.

  The soldiers formed up with the other survivors of the company and moved off northwards. Around them, the jungle was alive with the sound of movement. Matasane had ordered an all-out attack on the Australian positions. The First and Second battalions were tasked with taking an enemy strongpoint five miles ahead that prisoners had identified as Slater’s Knoll. Even for the hardened jungle fighters of the Sixth Division it took more than three hours to reach the assembly point as they stumbled through swamps and over gullies, fording waist-high rivers. An hour into the march a spine-chilling rush through the air above heralded the beginning of the artillery barrage that would hopefully destroy the enemy wire. The flash of bursting shells followed almost instantly, lighting up the night sky and creating terrifying shapes on the jungle floor. A moment later they heard the crump of the 75mm shells landing far ahead. Hamasuna’s men grinned nervously at each other in the bursts of pale light, taking comfort from the show of Imperial power, but they knew the barrage would also warn the enemy an attack was on the way. The only question being the timing of it. He thought of the soldiers waiting for him on the knoll ahead. He had seen Australian prisoners being marched back for interrogation, big men with brutal, angry faces, fearful of their fate and resentful of their captivity. They would be exhausted and frightened, but at least they wouldn’t be hungry. The thought of food made his stomach grumble. Westerners ate like dogs from tins of greasy canned meat, but after months of privation even that was incentive enough.

  Word to halt came back from the unit ahead and an orderly appeared, whispering for the officers to go forward. Hamasuna found the other company commanders at the bottom of a steep gully huddled around Captain Minoru, the battalion’s most senior surviving officer. Soldiers shielded the men w
ith coats and with a pen torch Minoru identified their position on a crude map. ‘We attack up this slope,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, indicating a feature about two hundred metres ahead. ‘A banzai charge of all companies. The signal will be a blue flare. Make sure your men are ready in ten minutes. Banzai!’

  ‘Banzai.’

  XXII

  Jamie froze at the soft knock at the compartment door and for the first time on Keith Devlin’s mission he wished he’d brought some kind of weapon. He motioned Magda back to the window and stepped warily to one side as the knock was repeated. Very carefully he pushed the door a few inches, then opened it fully to allow Boris and Ludmilla to enter. They’d changed into pyjamas and thick robes. The husband avoided eye contact as he laboriously climbed the ladder to the top bunk, lay back and stared at the ceiling. Ludmilla handed Jamie a brown paper bag before taking her place below her husband.

  ‘Spasibo, Ludmilla.’ He nodded his thanks, opening the bag to find a pair of sweet pastries. Magda caught his eye and he shrugged. ‘They had nothing to do with it. Our visitors probably made them an offer they couldn’t refuse to stay away for a little longer while they were changing for bed.’

  ‘So I’m just supposed to forget the fact that I had to spend quarter of an hour within reach of Harry the Hatchet’s twitching fingers?’ She shook her head and the raven hair shimmered. ‘No way, Jamie. I want to know what the hell is going on.’

  ‘Now?’ Jamie lowered his voice to match Magda’s.

  She frowned and glanced across at Ludmilla, who was already snoring gently. ‘I wouldn’t want to disturb them.’

  ‘We could go out in the corridor,’ he offered.

  ‘We might wake them when we come back in.’

  ‘Tomorrow then.’

  She took a deep breath and pinned him with dark eyes that told him that tomorrow there’d be no wriggle room. ‘First thing.’

  They slept fully dressed, just in case. Lying in the darkness, the rhythmic clatter of the train’s progress east was a faint backdrop in his mind and the gentle side-to-side motion of the carriage barely noticeable after nine hours. Jamie could hear the sound of regular breathing from the bunks opposite, but he guessed Magda was still awake below him. He sensed her frustration, but the delay suited Jamie because he needed some time to make some sense of what had happened.

  He’d first encountered the enigmatic Mr Lim a few years earlier when they’d discovered a mutual interest in the Sun Stone, a peculiar leftover from a fallen meteorite that had opened up the possibility of controlled nuclear fusion and a source of unlimited power. They’d struck a deal in a Munich airport coffee house but, unknown to Mr Lim, it had been of the one-sided variety. Fortunately, when it turned out the Sun Stone was lost forever amongst a million tons of rubble buried beneath Dresden, Lim hadn’t seemed too put out. And that was that.

  Now Lim had appeared out of nowhere to present Jamie with another infuriating riddle, matched to a tantalizing offer: What if there was a man – perhaps in Germany, perhaps not … Twice in two days Jamie Saintclair had been offered the Holy Grail of the art world, and he had no doubt that each of the two men could deliver what he had promised. So why did it feel as if he was in the middle of a frozen lake with the sun on his back, the ice creaking louder with every step and dry land a mile away in any direction? Because the Russians and the Chinese both wanted a piece of him. In the first instance, he didn’t have any option; he could still feel the chill in his bones from that Lubyanka cell. In the second, it looked as if the choice was somewhere down the line, which meant he would just have to make it when it came. On the face of it, only one of his new allies was interested in his commission for Keith Devlin, and Mr Lim seemed happy for him to carry it out … to a point. But could he really believe the Russians? Even if they’d been sincere, how would they react when they discovered – as they undoubtedly would – that their faithful new comrade had spent fifteen cosy minutes alone with a high-ranking agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security?

  Then there was the question of just when Mr Lim and – he smiled at Magda’s description – Harry the Hatchet had begun taking an interest in Jamie Saintclair. Certainly since Moscow, because that was where they must have boarded the train. But if Lim was telling the truth about the level of surveillance on Keith Devlin, it was possible they’d been tracking him since Sydney. Jamie had no doubt Devlin’s man Max had followed him in Berlin, but had Lim searched the hotel room? He tried to remember what had been in his suitcase. His laptop, but it had only the few basic details that had brought him to Germany. He hadn’t yet made the connection with Tokyo, but that didn’t matter either, because he and Devlin had talked openly on the phone about the possibilities, which presumably meant the Chinese knew as much as he did.

  The constant rhythmic jolt and clatter of the train seemed to eat into his mind, numbing one sector at a time into a relaxed trancelike state. His last thought before the darkness closed in was that Keith Devlin’s quest was far from the joyride it had seemed in Sydney, accompanied by a pang of guilt that he hadn’t contacted Fiona.

  His first thought when he woke was that he must phone her. If it was 7 a.m. here – and here was somewhere between Kirov, where they’d stopped two hours earlier, and Perm, another five hours up the line – his best guess was that, with Sydney time eight hours ahead of Moscow time, and Krasnoyarsk four hours ahead of Moscow, the time in Sydney was probably just after lunch, give or take a few hours either way.

  He heard a rustle from the bunk below and knew Magda was awake too. They lay in bed waiting awkwardly while the Russians emerged from their bunks and wrapped themselves in their thick, all-encompassing dressing gowns. Ludmilla cheerily announced that there were always long queues for both of the bathrooms in the morning, but that was what she and Boris were used to. They’d be happy to allow the sir i ledi to go first. The next step was finding breakfast, but judging by last night’s experience with the restaurant car there seemed little point in looking there. The immediate problem was solved by Ludmilla’s gift of pastries the previous night accompanied by tea in polystyrene cups purchased from the provodnik trolley. When they’d eaten, they followed Boris’s example of folding the bedclothes and stowing them on the upper bunk, and settled for another day of confinement that the schedule said would be punctuated by a single stop at Perm.

  Jamie suspected Magda was still desperate to discuss the events of the previous day. His first priority was to call Fiona, but when he checked his phone it was out of battery. Annoyed he hadn’t thought of it earlier he looked vainly around the tiny compartment for a power source to recharge the machine. It meant that, as well as having no phones, which was bad enough, there’d be no access to the computer or the internet for at least two more days, which for some reason was worse. It felt like having one hand cut off.

  Eventually Magda could stand it no longer. ‘We need to talk about our visitors,’ she hissed, drawing a glance from the two Russians.

  ‘All right,’ he conceded warily. ‘Let’s go and stretch our legs.’

  Outside in the corridor someone had opened a window, which only emphasized the oppressive heat and fetid atmosphere in the compartment. Washing facilities in the train bathrooms were utilitarian at best, with just a trickle of water. In those conditions it didn’t take long for the scents of four people sleeping, eating and in Boris’s case – he’d started sucking at a bottle of vodka after breakfast – drinking together to become overwhelming. They stood in front of one of the viewing points, Jamie leaning on the rail and Magda clutching it as if it was the handle of a life raft. A tiny village with redwood walls, green tiled roofs and an onion-dome church flashed past like something out of a dream, to be replaced by the endless steppe.

  ‘So?’

  ‘It turns out,’ Jamie explained hesitantly, ‘that the Chinese have an interest in Mr Devlin’s mining project neither of us was aware of.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said in a way that told him it wasn’t okay at all. ‘But what
kind of Chinese? Harry the Hatchet didn’t look like your average trade delegate.’

  ‘I’m not sure what kind,’ he said, which was the truth, even if he could make a pretty good guess. ‘Businessmen, or possibly some kind of state official. I know his bodyguard looked intimidating, but the chap I spoke to was very reasonable.’

  The words were accompanied by what he hoped was a comforting smile, but the early-morning Magda Ross appeared to be immune to his charms. ‘What did he say, specifically?’

  ‘It’s a bit difficult, to be honest, because he played the inscrutable Oriental to the hilt. All he wanted to do was to let me know of their interest and that they would be … I think monitoring is probably the best word … monitoring our progress.’

  ‘And that’s all there is to it?’ She didn’t hide her disbelief. ‘They bribe our Russian neighbours and scare me half to death to give you a message they could have sent on a postcard?’

  ‘That’s it,’ he insisted. ‘I suspect they left the train at Kirov, but there’s a possibility someone stayed on board to keep an eye on us. It doesn’t really matter, because we can’t change anything until we reach Krasnoyarsk in another thirty-odd hours.’ He sensed she still wasn’t convinced. ‘You said you wanted an adventure,’ he pointed out. ‘Well, here you are travelling across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express, pursued by inscrutable Chinese agents and sharing a cabin with the Posh and Becks of the steppe. What more can you ask?’