Over the Hill: a novel of the Pacific War (Crash Dive Book 6)

by Craig DiLouie

  Braddock would take a big risk to save his men. Play a part to boost their morale. Lead them out of harm’s way.

  He wouldn’t die for them. He was no hero.

  “I’m sorry,” Braddock said, his voice cracking.

  Whitley burst through the surface. He wiped blood from his nose and grinned. “We did it! I can’t believe it!”

  Braddock rubbed his tearing eyes, blinking at the salty sting. “Did you remember to tap the hatch so the men know we’re out?”

  The boatswain’s mate looked around. “Where’s Gentry?”

  “Did you tap the goddamn hatch?”

  “Yeah, Chief!”

  “Gentry didn’t make it…”

  The words trailed off at the sound of bombs and AA fire. The planes had reached their targets, a vast armada of Japanese ships that filled the view to the north. The ships were roaming in figure eights, absorbing strafing runs.

  No sign of the captain or the other men who’d been topside. Then he spotted a man in the distance waving at him.

  “Holy shit,” Whitley said, pointing at the Yamato. “The captain went after that?”

  “Help me get the raft inflated,” Braddock growled. “There’s a man out there needs help.”

  One by one, more crewmen floated to the surface. Most made it, though the sea swallowed a few who were wracked by the bends or weighed down by sheer panic. The exhausted sailors did what they could to save their brothers.

  The warships crowding the northern vista turned and began to steam out of sight. Floating in the water and packed in the raft, the men watched them go.

  The ships sailed over the hill.

  Whitley broke the silence. “That all you fuckers got?!”

  The sailors erupted in screaming taunts and insults. Some raised their middle fingers. Others beckoned the Japanese back to fight.

  Behind them, the buoy tugged and plunged into the sea.

  The Sandtiger and those still aboard had gone on eternal patrol.

  Miyazaki prisoner of war camp on the Japanese home island of Kyushu.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BAPTISM

  “Good morning,” said the interpreter in charge of discipline. “Konnichiwa.”

  Charlie stared at the muscular soldier until a bamboo rod slapped the back of his skull. He stooped to approximate a bow.

  “Konnichiwa, Gunso Sano,” the Americans said in ragged chorus.

  After disembarking at Kure, Charlie and his comrades had boarded a crowded merchantman bound for Miyazaki on Kyushu, the westernmost of the Japanese home islands. The hellish ride down the coast was mercifully brief. Last night, they’d marched through cold rain until they reached Miyazaki Branch Camp, located two miles from the much larger prisoner of war base camp.

  A naval guard unit, not the Imperial Army, ran the branch camp. It included an interrogation center.

  They’d found the place eerily quiet. Sergeant Sano had processed them as prisoners and warned against breaking the rules, of which there were many. Chief among them was no speaking at any time except when addressed by a Japanese.

  The sergeant had issued them each a threadbare blanket, toothbrush, tooth powder, hand towel, and dry clothes. They ate a brief meal of soup and warm rice before being marched into solitary cells. Charlie slept on a tatami mat on the floor until the guards woke him at dawn.

  “Yoku yattane!” said Sergeant Sano. “Very good, pilgrims. You learn Japanese. You show respect to Japanese, any rank. Okay?”

  “Hai,” Charlie said with the others.

  “You learn routine. You answer questions. You work. Most important rule is you do not speak unless answering a Japanese. Okay?”

  “Hai.”

  “Any problem, you disciplined. You try to escape, you are killed.” He tightened his grip on the katana sword on his hip. “Okay?”

  “Hai.”

  Sano pivoted and bowed to the officer standing beside him. “This is Colonel Murata, camp commander. In Japanese, taisa.”

  With his leathery skin and eyes narrowed to slits, the commander looked old enough to have served in the Russo-Japanese War. He murmured. The sergeant translated.

  “He say, ‘This is special camp for special prisoners. You are not prisoners of war. You do not receive privileges given prisoners of war. We rescue you from death. If you do not cooperate, we give you back.’”

  Colonel Murata turned and began his slow walk back to the camp headquarters next to the guard barracks. Stunned, Charlie watched him go. The commander had just informed him that he would remain missing in action, presumed lost.

  No Red Cross supervision of his treatment. No rights or privileges. Interrogation without boundaries.

  Because he was already dead.

  Beside him, Percy choked on a sob.

  “Here is Lance Corporal Chiba,” Sano said. “Heicho Chiba. Very friendly. He take you to tenko. Roll call.”

  Lance Corporal Chiba was a squat, pudgy soldier with round glasses and a ridiculous smile, like something out of a cartoon propaganda poster. A club shaped like a small baseball bat swung from his wide hip as he waddled over the cold dirt.

  The man regarded the prisoners and chuckled. “More friends, eh? Tokubetsu.”

  Charlie nudged Percy. The Americans bowed. “Konnichiwa, Heicho Chiba.”

  The lance corporal sidled next to Charlie, put his thick arm around his shoulders, and squeezed. “Good friend. Ryokai, Chiba-san!” He laughed. “Iiko.”

  The Americans followed him across the yard to the barracks where other prisoners had assembled, about forty in all. Percy sobbed again. They were matchstick men, reduced by starvation. Faces bruised from violence. Ragged uniforms.

  After the courteous treatment the Imperial Navy had given them on the Akasuki, Charlie had believed the Japanese might offer the same here.

  He’d never been more wrong.

  The submariners fell into formation with the other prisoners while Chiba, flanked by young soldiers with rifles, took roll call.

  At the end, he opened a black leather notebook. The matchstick men around Charlie stiffened at the sight of it. Some of them were shaking.

  He exchanged a glance with Rusty, whose eyes reflected his own mounting terror.

  “Keiotsuke!” The lance corporal pointed at a man. “Ichi.” Then another. “Ni. Talking.”

  The men had apparently broken the no-talking rule.

  Two guards stepped forward and yanked the Americans in front of Chiba, who chuckled as he slid his two-foot club from its thong. “Eenie, meenie…”

  He reared at the American on the left.

  And knocked a baseball out of the park.

  The American collapsed like a house of cards, and that’s when Charlie recognized him with a horrified gasp.

  The man was a fellow member of the Silent Service. Lt. Commander Reilly, captain of the Dartfish.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  INTERROGATION

  Guards escorted Charlie to a small room with flimsy, bare wood walls and two chairs set at a table. Where he met Mr. Nakano. His first interrogation.

  “Tell me about your hometown,” the interrogator said.

  As required, Charlie stood at attention during the questioning. “I’m from Tiburon. Near San Francisco.”

  Nakano was a young, handsome man with an easy smile. He spoke perfect English. Yale University, class of 1938. Worked as a general affairs clerk and interpreter at the Japanese embassy before the war. He wore slick suits and highly polished shoes. He was gunreibu, Naval Intelligence based at Kure.

  “Never heard of that town,” Nakano said. “Did you work there?”

  “My father worked at the rail yards. He built passenger ferries for the railroad. He died in a work accident when I was a kid.”

  He remembered the codfish canneries on the shoreline, the powder plants, the oyster beds, and the great trains. Like everywhere else, the town fell on hard times in the ’30s. It was even harder for the Harrisons. Charlie’s mother and sisters
did their best to raise him, while he did his best to pitch in. He worked odd jobs in Tiburon and, when he couldn’t find work there, across the bay in the mean streets of San Francisco.

  Memories of the real world would get him through all of this. Now, he wished he’d taken the time to see his family when he was at Mare Island, just before boarding the Sandtiger nearly two years and a lifetime ago.

  Men went through their lives with so many important things unsaid.

  “So you joined the Navy as soon as you were old enough,” Nakano said.

  “That’s right.”

  When he was a boy, the U.S. Navy used the coaling station on the eastern shore of the Tiburon peninsula. Charlie watched great warships dock under the giant cranes, and he fell in love. From the age of ten, he wanted to be a sailor. As soon as he was old enough, he joined up to provide for his family and see the world. He qualified as an officer candidate and attended the Naval Academy.

  “Good,” said Mr. Nakano. “Now tell me about Evie.”

  Charlie hesitated. “She’s a friend.”

  Nakano removed from his pocket a wrinkled sheet of paper and unfolded it. “‘My dearest Evie, I love you,’” he read. “‘I’m sorry. Be happy.’ There is no signature, but Lt. Russell Grady said it is yours. And yours, to Lucy, was for his wife.”

  Charlie remembered holding Evie’s hand as they strolled down Main Street on a Saturday night. The carousing seamen and cannery workers swarmed the streets and gave the town a carnival atmosphere. The men crowded saloons, drinking in defiance of Prohibition or holding impromptu prayer meetings when word got around the revenuers were on the way.

  At a rowdy baseball game hosted by the volunteer fire department, he kissed her for the first time.

  He said, “Rusty and I kept letters for each other in the case the other was killed.”

  A sunny picnic on a hill overlooking the bay. They’d found an ancient native rock carving and wondered what it meant. Men’s Room, she’d guessed. Women’s Lingerie.

  “Why did you write this to her?” Nakano asked.

  “It’s what I wanted her to know if I didn’t make it home.”

  “I mean to say, why do wish to tell her you’re sorry?”

  She’d collapsed sobbing when he’d told her he was leaving to join the Navy. That he couldn’t settle down until he’d ventured into the world and tested himself. It had broken his heart to leave her, but he had to go.

  “Please mail her the letter,” Charlie said, believing he was going to die here.

  “I can do better than that,” Nakano said. “I can send you home to her. But first, the war must end. Help me, and you can go home. You can go home to your girl.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MERRY CHRISTMAS

  Nearly two months into Charlie’s captivity, the guard kicked him awake at dawn.

  Wrapped in his tattered blanket on his tatami mat, he stretched his aching body and rose. He folded the blanket and greeted the weak sunlight streaming through the window’s wooden bars.

  Outside, snow was falling. A good inch of it blanketed the frost-hardened ground. Charlie shuffled to the spigot on feet clad in wood shoes, where Rusty, Percy, and Morrison had gathered to wash.

  Percy sagged with depression. Rusty looked determined to survive for his family but wasting away on the starvation diet. Morrison sported fresh bruises from interrogation and Lance Corporal Chiba’s psychopathic attention.

  All of them hungry and growing thinner by the day.

  Charlie offered them a smile, which was his only way to communicate without earning a beating. Rusty mirrored it, though it crossed his face for only an instant. Percy gave a glum nod. Morrison glared, his eyes burning with hatred for his captors. They shivered in the bitter cold, stomping their feet to keep warm.

  Charlie had envisioned leading them in captivity, pep talks and plans, but that wasn’t how it worked out. They lived in isolation, surviving at the edge. The special barracks was like a monastery dedicated to immolation.

  Still, he hoped his smile conveyed their lone consolation; they’d all survived another day. One day closer to the end of the war and freedom. They just had to tough out today, and they’d do it together.

  At least, he knew he drew strength from their presence. If he’d had to do this alone, without a familiar face, he might have given up. Rusty had his family, Morrison his desire to show the Japanese he’d never break. Percy seemingly had no such anchor and worried Charlie the most.

  While Charlie’s memories and thoughts of Evie tethered him to the real world, he’d worn them to the nub, and reality seemed further away with each passing day. As they’d lost their power to buoy his spirits, he found resolve from his comrades. He had to stay strong for them. That was his mission. He was still their skipper, and he had to stay strong.

  The men gathered for tenko, and they studied Lance Corporal Chiba’s face to read his mood. From what little Charlie could learn, B-29 Superfortresses had bombed Tokyo. America had her airbases in the Marianas up and running and would soon pound the home islands around the clock. Patriotic to the point of fanaticism, Chiba had become even more erratic and sadistic in recent weeks.

  Charlie had grown adept at reading the guards and categorizing them as compassionate, neutral, or cruel in varying degrees. He’d learned plenty of Japanese but had become far more fluent in his captors’ body language, which signaled whether a beating was coming.

  Though rejects from the Imperial Navy and even the Japanese Army, most of these boys were professionally neutral, and some were even kind toward their prisoners. Only a few were predators like Chiba, swaggering around like Napoleon with his club and samurai sword, confusing Bushido with abuse of prisoners who could not defend themselves. Unfortunately, it took only one man like Chiba to create a reign of terror.

  Today, however, Chiba seemed jolly as Sergeant Sano made a rare appearance to tell the prisoners a big surprise was on its way.

  A truck rumbled through the open gate a short time later. Like the usual vehicle that hauled supplies to the camp, it rattled at the edge of collapse, spewing black smoke from a charcoal engine.

  A photographer stepped from the passenger side and took pictures as the driver pulled back a tarp.

  Charlie gasped, his knees nearly buckling.

  Oranges.

  A massive pile of oranges, bright as gold.

  “Go on, pilgrims,” Sano said. “You may each take one.”

  Consisting of two prisoner barracks, headquarters and guard barracks, interrogation center, and supporting facilities, the branch camp was isolated from the larger base PW camp. Only special prisoners came here, unofficial and off the books. Airmen, mostly, along with submariners, those the Japanese believed offered the most useful intelligence and, as a bonus, hated the most. To get the prisoners to cough up information, they were systematically broken down through abuse, which included living on half rations.

  For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the Japanese served gruel made of rice, maize, and soybeans, and it tasted like dust. Sometimes, soup with some carrot tops, potato peels, tofu, or fish in it. When Charlie first arrived at the camp, he’d suffered chronic diarrhea, squatting over a hole in the benjo multiple times a day until his body adjusted to the new diet. It barely sustained him, but there was no sugar or fat. Not enough calories to keep up with the aching cold, hard labor, and grueling calisthenics every morning. And not enough nutrition, leading to diseases such as beriberi and scurvy among the prisoners. Charlie had already begun to develop bleeding sores.

  When he wasn’t thinking about home or reliving the bitter loss of his command, he dreamed of food. Juicy steaks, fried eggs, chocolate cake, sizzling bacon, warm bread. As time passed, it grew to dominate nearly every waking thought.

  Charlie lurched forward like an automaton, grabbing an orange and shuffling back into formation. His fingers kneaded the rough skin.

  All the while, the photographer snapped pictures, and then he nodded to Sano and return
ed to the truck with his equipment.

  The sergeant said, “Good! Now put them back.”

  The prisoners groaned. Some snarled like animals. The Japanese had used them for a propaganda stunt. The men wept as they returned the fruit to the truck, which drove away, leaving a choking cloud of smoke.

  Lance Corporal Chiba chuckled and said, “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PROGRESS

  “Tell me about your hometown,” Nakano said.

  Charlie crouched on the balls of his feet with his arms raised above his head. Pain shot through his ankles and knees. “You know where I’m from.”

  “Tell me about your hometown.”

  His legs trembled. It amazed him how ingeniously simple torture could be. Out of everything they’d done to him, he hated the crouch the most. “I already told you. Every week, for the past…”

  He stumbled as he realized his brain couldn’t recall how long he’d been here. Was it March? Had it really been five months?

  And his hometown? He wasn’t sure of that anymore either. He felt like he’d been born in this nightmarish place.

  They hadn’t let him sleep in days, handcuffing him in uncomfortable positions and punching him when he nodded off. They’d shaved his head. Sores from scurvy had opened in his skin, his joints had stiffened from malnutrition, and spreading paralysis had set into his legs from beriberi. They’d blindfolded him and rammed a club into his guts whenever Nakano didn’t like his answers.

  “I’ll wait,” Nakano said. “Until I get bored and order the guards to hurt you.”

  A stabbing twinge shot up his calves. His hands were numb.

  “I’m getting bored,” the interrogator said.

  “Tiburon,” Charlie cried.

  “Do you think I like asking the same questions over and over? Give me something I can use! How many submarines are in your fleet?”

  The agony was unbearable. “I don’t—”

  Nakano picked a handful of manuals off the table and waved them. “I know how your submarine works, Mr. Johnston.”