‘What more can I ask?’ She shook her head and finally smiled. ‘Only that when we leave Krasnoyarsk, whatever direction we are going in, we do it in a plane. For some reason the Trans-Siberian Express has lost its allure.’
‘I guarantee it.’ Jamie grinned. ‘In fact, I’ll fly the bloody thing myself if it comes to it. No more Minsk, Pinsk, Chelyabinsk in the second-class compartment from Hell for us. If we find the Bougainville head in Krasnoyarsk, we’ll take off for Sydney to hand it over to Devlin, then enjoy a bit of R and R. I’ll introduce you to my family on Devlin’s private island. If not, it’s off to Tokyo and our appointment at the Last Chance Saloon.’
Magda’s face turned serious again. ‘What do you think our chances really are of finding the head in Krasnoyarsk?’
‘Realistically? Probably less than fifty-fifty,’ he admitted. ‘We know Gennady Berzarin was in Berlin at the right time and he wasn’t averse to taking sweeteners from the Nazis. The problem is that for a man whose primary motive was to make a profit, the head wouldn’t be a big prize.’ He remembered what had been said in the Moscow dacha. ‘And then there’s the family. They came from a cultured background; Siberian aristocracy who survived the October Revolution and what followed by living on their wits. Is a shrunken head really something the Berzarins would have passed down from father to son?’
‘If it’s such a wild-goose chase, why are we here?’
‘Because the one thing I’ve learned in this business is that you take nothing for granted. Maybe Berzarin never had the head, but we won’t know for certain unless we ask the right questions of the right people.’ And, he thought with a familiar twinge of guilt, a certain person wanted me here for reasons I don’t understand and can’t tell you.
They spent the rest of the day reading and dozing and chatting. By now Boris was more or less comatose. Jamie learned from Ludmilla that the couple were on their way to Irkutsk where, much to their annoyance, their eldest son, an aircraft engineer, was to marry a local Siberian girl. Yes, she was pretty, in that doe-eyed eastern fashion, but what good was a wife who could not bake a loaf or boil an egg, ser? She shot a sly glance at Magda who sat by the window staring out at the never-changing flat, featureless landscape. ‘You will marry some day?’
Jamie spent a moment studying Magda’s reflection in the glass. ‘I’ve asked her a hundred times,’ he shook his head solemnly. ‘But she won’t marry me until I learn to cook.’
Magda turned at the Russian woman’s bark of laughter. ‘What did you say to her?’
‘I told her the tractor factory joke,’ he lied. ‘It has them rolling in the aisles every time. Nikita points to a red tractor and says to Ilya—’
‘Idiot,’ she said and slipped past him to the door. ‘I think I’ll freshen up.’
‘Suit yourself, but you don’t know what you’re missing.’
She was gone for fifteen minutes and Jamie was just becoming concerned when the door slipped back. He knew something was wrong the instant he saw her face. She was breathing hard and the blood was high in her cheeks. It took a moment before he realized she wasn’t frightened, just very angry.
‘What happened?’ He got to his feet and helped her to her seat. Ludmilla closed the door and looked on apprehensively, clucking like a mother hen.
‘A man was waiting for me outside the bathroom.’ Her eyes hardened at the memory. ‘He was drunk and he asked me for a cigarette. When I told him I didn’t have any, he started to interrogate me. Was I a tourist? Where was I from? What was I doing on the train? Was I with anyone? I tried to get past him, but he wouldn’t let me.’ She met Jamie’s eyes and shrugged. ‘What was a girl to do? I used my knee where it hurts the most and he won’t be bothering anyone else for a while. The only problem is,’ her face turned serious again, ‘I don’t think he was as drunk as he acted.’
‘Chinese?’ Jamie asked.
She shook her head.
He went to the door and checked the corridor to right and left, but no one was in sight, drunk or otherwise, and he closed it again. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘we stay in the compartment unless it’s strictly necessary, and when we do go out we go out together. Okay?’
Ludmilla cut in with a machine-gun rattle of Russian demanding to know what had upset Magda. Jamie explained what had happened. She looked at her snoring husband with a look of pity, but when she spoke her voice was heavy with contempt and she shook her head. ‘Ach, vodka.’
XXIII
Bougainville, April 1945
Hamasuna found his way back to his men and issued his orders. As he waited for word to move, the finality of the situation struck him like a sandbag thrown from a great height, weakening his legs and loosening his bowels. He dug his nails into his palms so he could focus on the pain and not what awaited him, cloaked by the night, a few hundred paces ahead. The Australians would have been strengthening these positions for weeks. There would be barbed wire, trip wires and mines, machine guns sited to converge on the likeliest assault points, mortars that could be vectored on to any potential weak spot, and grenades, ready to be showered in their dozens on the attackers. In addition, the supporting artillery would probably be zeroed in on the exact point where Hamasuna stood. Their tanks, though vulnerable in the jungle, were devastating defensive weapons. They were brutes, the Australians, but they weren’t fools, and they had proved tenacious, deadly opponents. Many of the men breathing heavily in the surrounding darkness would not be returning to their bunkers tonight. Yet they would die, if not cheerfully, then at least willingly, and not for their Emperor, because such romantic notions had long faded, but for their families. On this night the Buin road on Bougainville was the front line in the defence of their homeland. Every man who died knew he would be honoured by his family and his community and his name would be recited at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Hamasuna pictured his family at the shrine and the image gave him strength and resolve.
‘Forward.’ He moved automatically, surprised to find he already had his sword in his right hand and his pistol, the comfortably familiar Taisho, in his left. Beside him Murayama and the others began to shuffle forward, their unwieldy Arisaka rifles at the port, the twenty-inch bayonets dulled by soot to stop them glinting in the shell bursts. They moved in almost total silence; a thousand men a mere shadow flowing and spreading across the jungle floor accompanied only by the soft rustle of disturbed vegetation. After a few moments they passed through a line of kneeling men. Hamasuna recognized the short stubby barrels of grenade launchers that would provide the attack with close support. The sight made his heart pound because it meant the moment of no return was near. He could feel the tension all around like a physical presence and he had to force himself to breathe. The sound of a soft breeze blowing through a pine wood was followed by a sharp pop and the blackness above turned bright blue.
‘Banzai!’ The initial cry came from the officers and was echoed immediately by a thousand throats. The mass of infantry moved forward in a rush with Hamasuna and his company at its heart.
‘Banzai!’ The scream tore his throat and he felt a God-like invincibility. He was a Samurai, a warrior of old, with a thousand-stitch belt that would ward off the weapons of his enemies. All around him the air sang with the howls of men channelling their own fear to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies. The pace quickened and the ground began to rise. More flares, this time from the enemy, and now Hamasuna could see the men around him as clearly as if it were noon, their shoulders hunched, pot helmets low over snarling faces and their rifles clutched tightly to their chests. Slater’s Knoll was a key feature of a long ridge defended by the Australians. From left and right came the steady rhythmic clatter of Vickers machine guns, and Hamasuna imagined the heavy-calibre bullets cutting swathes of death through the flanking battalions. The guns were answered immediately by the thunk of grenade launchers and the quick-fire rasp of the Type 96 as the Japanese support platoons opened up in reply. He felt the ground beneath his feet change and he was cli
mbing, the slope steep and slippery beneath his rubber-soled shoes, struggling to maintain the pace of the men to his left and right. Up above, the sharp snap of rifle fire, the sound of screams and the crack of grenades signalled that the leading companies had reached the enemy line, but Hamasuna could see nothing but jungle and the backs of his comrades. A heavy machine gun opened fire somewhere close and suddenly men were falling all around him. He gritted his teeth and a growling sound came from his throat as he forced himself on. He stumbled on a body wriggling in a tangle of barbed wire. Twenty metres ahead he could see the first sandbags of slit trenches and his body automatically tensed, ready for the bullet that would end his life. But these positions had already been over-run, the Australian defenders huddled dead in the bottoms of their foxholes or cut down where they’d tried to flee.
‘On!’ Hamasuna urged his men, only now noticing that the forty he’d started with were down to twenty or less. Ragged, panting scarecrows with eyes a hundred years older than their faces, leaning on their rifles like cripples.
‘On,’ he screamed again, and the cry was taken up by Murayama, who kicked and pushed his comrades in to motion. Another patch of thick jungle and suddenly they burst into open. By some miracle of nature, night had turned into day and Hamasuna could see barbed-wire emplacements to their right and a line of foxholes ahead. Somehow they had veered round in a half-circle to come in on the flank of the second defensive line. He didn’t hesitate.
‘Banzai!’ He launched himself at the rifle pits, exulting at the site of startled faces beneath the steel helmets. A rifle came round to meet his charge, but before the owner could fire Hamasuna had pumped three bullets into his chest. The company must have been joined by at least one other, because Japanese soldiers were swarming through the position. A big man with three white stripes on the arm of his shirt rose up in front of Hamasuna with his hands raised in surrender and terror in his eyes. In that moment the Australian soldier became the embodiment of everything Hamasuna hated. The government who had torn him from his family. The enemy who had killed so many of his friends. The senior officers who had forced him to endure the last three hours of terror. With a single convulsive movement he brought his sword down across the man’s neck, carving diagonally across his chest and ribs, heart blood staining the air pink. The soldier gave a terrible shriek and collapsed slowly backwards.
Hamasuna stood shaking over the body, his bloody sword in hand and his eyes darting left and right seeking the next threat or the next victim. The cacophony of war suddenly became overwhelming, like a wave that threatened to swamp and drown him. Men screaming for their mothers or their wives; terrible cries in a language he didn’t understand; rifles, machine guns and grenades combining in a devil’s concerto. It paralysed him. His legs wouldn’t move. He had to …
A savage shove in the back broke the spell. ‘Get moving, you bastard, or I’ll kill you myself.’ He found himself staring bewilderedly into the snarling face of the battalion commander, the pistol in his hand aimed at Hamasuna’s heart and his finger on the trigger. ‘Your objective is over there.’ Minoru pointed. ‘Your comrades are dying while you stand here pissing yourself.’
‘Hai!’ Hamasuna bobbed his head and sprinted in the direction of the pointing finger, screaming at his company to form on him. They reached a path that took them through some kind of plantation, and within moments it opened out on to a clearing. The sight that met his eyes almost shocked him to a standstill. No time for thought. ‘On,’ he screamed. ‘Forward.’
The open space was lined with tight-strung barbed wire and dominated by a long ridge. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers – dead, wounded and alive – were trapped in the bowl beneath a score of machine guns. The living struggled to break through the wire and reach their enemies, being cut down in their turn by streams of tracer bullets that swept the clearing like fiery whiplashes. Despite the carnage, hundreds more men struggled to join them in the blood-soaked arena below the crest. Hamasuna found himself surrounded by snarling comrades, all fighting their way forward into the cauldron.
‘Forward!’ Even as he screamed the word his whole world turned red and he was at the centre of a kaleidoscope of jagged shapes; like being in a fire surrounded by a hundred smashed mirrors. When his mind cleared he was lying on his back staring at leaden clouds. He was alive, and very slowly his body informed him he wasn’t badly hurt. Men and parts of men lay around him, and to his left a smoking crater in the earth showed where the shell that killed them had struck. His helmet was gone, and he’d lost his sword and his pistol. As his hand groped for the sword someone pulled him to his feet. Minoru’s screaming face filled his vision. Hamasuna watched the mouth work with disembodied interest, unable to hear a word until the captain slapped him hard on the cheek.
‘Tanks,’ Minoru screamed. ‘We cannot break through here. Withdraw your men and assemble with second company by the big bunker in the enemy front line. We’ll find a way to outflank them. There are drums of petrol …’ Minoru’s left eye turned black, then red, and in the same instant the back of his head exploded like an over-ripe pumpkin as the Australian sniper’s bullet exited his skull. The captain dropped like a stone at Hamasuna’s feet.
‘Back,’ Hamasuna screamed at the men around them. ‘We’ve been ordered back.’ He pushed his way to the rear, gathering what men he could. Most ignored him, driven mad by the strains of battle, the suffering they’d witnessed, and an almost inhuman lust for revenge. ‘Back.’
He was nearly clear of the wire when someone punched him in the lower back and he was on his hands and knees, staring at the churned-up ground. His eyes drifted along the underside of his body to his abdomen and a bloody mess of flesh and torn cloth just above his left hip. I’ve been shot, he concluded with a detachment he knew was caused by shock. A voice screamed at him to seek help, but Hamasuna could feel no pain. Logic told him that if he could feel no pain and still stand he must try to gather his men for a new attack. He pushed himself to his feet and stood swaying amid the storm of a battle that was still at its height. An exit wound must have an entry wound, but that seemed of secondary importance at the moment. There was very little bleeding, which meant … His brain couldn’t quite work out what it meant. He staggered towards the rear through a confused chaos of bodies and wounded men, wire and equipment.
Hamasuna’s next conscious memory was of being in the jungle and alone in the darkness. He woke with his back to a tree tormented by a thirst so intense his whole body seemed to have been sucked empty of liquid. His hands scrabbled to his waist and he almost cried out as he discovered the metal canteen on his belt had miraculously survived unscathed. Somehow he managed to unscrew the cap, lift it to his lips and drink deeply. The water was tepid, but as welcome as chilled sake, and provided instant benefit. A fire raged in his lower torso. He looked down expecting to see liquid leaking from his wound, but what little bleeding there had been seemed to have dried up.
Oddly, his mind felt clear. It was telling him to go home, but where was home? His last home had been the bunker he’d shared with his men and he determined to return there. His legs wouldn’t hold him upright, but it didn’t seem too difficult to crawl and he set off with a certainty that would have concerned him if he’d been more rational. His stomach felt bloated by the water he’d drunk. But the liquid sloshing around his insides wasn’t water, it was blood. The bullet had nicked a major artery and it had been leaking into his stomach cavity since he’d been shot. When he found the bunker what seemed a few minutes later he hauled his pain-tormented body inside, making a bed of the leaves and straw to lie on.
Slowly, the realization dawned that this isolated bunker had been abandoned months ago and the jungle had already begun to reclaim it. But that didn’t matter; all that mattered was that he was alive. His fingers sought out the precious map case and he hugged it to his chest. He would see Takako and the girls again after all, and he would inform the general personally about the Yamamoto briefcase. Comforted, Hamasuna lay back
and closed his eyes, the rise and fall of his chest becoming increasingly shallow, until, with a fitful sigh of regret, it ceased altogether.
XXIV
When the train pulled in at Krasnoyarsk’s immense palace of a station Jamie felt a sense of release, as if he’d been freed after a five-year jail stretch. It wasn’t so much the confinement as a desperate need to get away from his fellow inmates. Boris’s charms had faded with every hour he drank. By the previous night he’d been unable to make the ascent to the top bunk. Instead, he’d sat, an unseen but malevolent presence, at the bottom of his wife’s bed, leaning his head on the small table, alternately muttering curses to himself and emitting enormous farts that filled the cramped berth with their putrid odour.
Now, the Russian stared red-eyed as they packed their travel cases in silence. Jamie said a quick Russian goodbye, but Ludmilla surprised them by jumping to her feet and hugging Magda. ‘Mozhet ostal’noy chasti vashego puteshestviya v bezopasnosti i doroga ustlana lepestkami roz.’
Jamie translated. ‘Ludmilla says may your journey be safe and the road strewn with rose petals.’ From behind her back the little Russian produced a single rose in a plastic pocket, which she pressed into Magda’s hand.
‘I don’t …’
‘I should have remembered, the Russians are very big on gift-giving. Do you have anything small you can give her in return?’
Magda rummaged in her capacious handbag, but found nothing suitable. She exchanged a glance of panic with Jamie before a solution presented itself. Her hands went to her neck and untied the silk scarf she wore. She offered it to Ludmilla, but the Russian woman looked horrified.
‘What have I done?’
‘She thinks it’s too expensive.’
Magda smiled reassuringly. ‘Tell her I would be honoured if she wore it to her son’s wedding.’
The Samurai Inheritance Page 16