Charlie had taken that name for a reason. The Johnston was the destroyer that had made the first move against impossible odds to delay the Japanese juggernaut. Every time Nakano said it aloud, Charlie drew strength from it.
“But that’s all I—”
“Stop telling me things I already know,” the interrogator shouted. “Where are your submarines operating? How are your submarine forces organized? What is your supply situation? What new equipment did you have on your last patrol?”
“I already told you. It’s—”
“Above your pay grade, right.” The interrogator sighed with disgust and gestured to the empty chair. “Go ahead and sit.”
Charlie collapsed to his knees. He pulled himself into the chair and sat, gripping the base out of fear he’d fall off. “Thank you.”
So far, his officers hadn’t divulged that he was the captain. His secret safe, he only had to put up with this baseline of abuse. He wondered what Reilly of the Dartfish was going through, what simple but ingenious tortures reserved for captains he had to endure.
“Let’s take a break.” Nakano lit two cigarettes and passed one over. Charlie flinched and then accepted it gratefully after he realized he wasn’t going to be burned with it. Sakara brand.
“I’m sick of this,” Nakano said.
Charlie took a drag and coughed. “I think we’re making progress.”
The interrogator laughed. “Let’s talk man to man for a moment.”
He was barely listening, savoring the smoke. “Sure.”
“I think it’s admirable you want to serve your country. I do. You have served her well. But my superiors want information, and I’ll get it from you eventually. You know that, right?”
“No,” Charlie said. “Even if I knew something, I wouldn’t tell you. Ever.”
“Why, man?”
“You made me a special prisoner. You told me I’m already dead. I would have started making up stuff to give you long ago if I thought it’d make any difference.”
“You can reduce your suffering!”
Now it was Charlie’s turn to laugh, but it came out as a dry cackle. “I will tell you one thing, Mr. Nakano, with all respect. If you hit somebody with a stick enough, they’re going to tell you to shove your carrot up your ass.”
He’d already decided, to beat Nakano, he only had to wait. Every week, more prisoners, mostly crewmen of bomber planes shot down over Tokyo, arrived at the special barracks. As fresh prisoners entered, those who’d been there longest moved to other camps. The interrogation frequency for the Sandtiger’s officers, meanwhile, had stretched from every day to one day every week or two. And any useful intelligence Charlie might have became useless as time went on.
As if reading his thoughts, Nakano nodded and ground out his cigarette. “Fair enough. Are you done with your cigarette?”
From here on out, the interrogation would become even more brutal.
Charlie took a final drag, held it in his lungs, and blew a stream of smoke. “I’m ready.”
“Then let’s resume our game.” Nakano called out for the guard.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BAYONET DRILL
Midway through April 1945, Charlie woke at dawn. He folded his blanket, which was now infested with fleas, lice, and bedbugs. Shuffled outside to the spigot to wash. Visited the benjo to purge his dysentery. Lined up for tenko, listened to the men count off, ichi, ni, san…
He watched Lance Corporal Chiba pummel a B-24 Liberator pilot for an invented infraction. He ate his meager breakfast, gasped his way through calisthenics, and mopped the barracks.
The rising sun dispelled the morning chill. Patches of green on the muddy yard. Birds chirping. Spring in the air. A black-footed albatross glided onto the roof of the guard barracks and whistled. These birds followed ships around the Pacific, feeding off their garbage. Sailors once considered them good luck. Charlie smiled, reminded of the sea, his second home and one he missed as much as Tiburon.
With the arrival of spring, things were getting better. Interrogations were rare now. The horrible treatment designed to wear down the prisoners and compel them to talk had killed some of them. Following an inspection, a new medic had arrived, and he administered injections against dysentery and had arranged for a minor rations improvement.
As for Chiba, his attacks continued to grow more savage and unpredictable. Even this was a good sign, however. It meant America was winning the war. Bombers flew over Kyushu on a regular basis now. Several times, he heard the booms of naval bombardment. Third Fleet was off Japan’s shores now.
Hope fluttered through Charlie’s chest. The long winter was over, and after nearly six months in this hell, he was still alive.
The prisoners separated for work or interrogation. Rusty labored in the leather shop where he sat on a wood bench all day sewing ammunition pouches for the Imperial Army. Percy left the camp in a work party assigned to dig civilian bomb shelters. In February, he’d suffered a bout of hysteria and tried to kill himself, but the Japanese had sewn up his wounds so they could resume the pleasure of killing him slowly.
As for Morrison, the man’s blue eyes, set deeply in his misshapen and bruised face, continued to smolder with hatred for the Japanese. He and Charlie worked in the sprawling gardens just outside the camp, a task that started at the benjo. Using a dipper attached to a pole, the submariners traded off scooping shit from the hole and filling a bucket.
This done, they detached the pole and used it to haul the bucket swinging between them. The gate guard held his nose and laughed as he waved them through. They trudged to the garden and dumped the night soil into a trough, where it would be treated before being spread onto the field. Here, the prisoners grew potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, castor beans, and daikons, which were like turnips. Then they lugged water out in buckets and ladled it onto the plants.
It was dirty, tiring work, but Charlie loved watching the plants grow, the change in scenery, this brief sanctuary from Chiba’s random savagery. The idiotic simplicity of digging a hole and planting a seed. Taking his time mounding the earth as if this were some type of spiritual meditation. Here, in this tiny space between his hands, the world was beautiful, safe, and growing.
From the gardens, he could see the larger PW base camp to the west. Beyond that, power lines snaked down the Kyushu Mountains to the city in the north. Beautiful and ugly at the same time. Farmland all around.
By the end of the month, the first vegetables would be ready to harvest. Charlie hoped to steal some and share them with his crew, who were otherwise supplementing their diet by hunting rats, digging up worms, chewing on weeds.
On schedule, Japanese women wearing baggy pants or drab overalls hauled water along the road. Their men drafted to fight, these women continued to eke out a meager living in Kyushu’s hill country.
An old woman stopped and fixed Charlie with her disapproving stare. Every morning, she eyeballed him on her way back to her village. The first time, Charlie had been embarrassed at his shabby appearance, but he’d shrugged it off. If she had a problem with how he looked, she could take it up with Hirohito.
This morning, the old woman didn’t walk on. She approached the prisoners, who bowed among rows of cabbage. Her hand swept over the Americans as she yelled at their minder. The guard shrugged, argued back, then threw up his hands in frustration. By now, Charlie understood enough Japanese to infer the Americans disgusted her. He ignored her and returned to his work.
When he looked up, she was standing in front of him.
He bowed again. “Konnichiwa.”
She pursed her lips and said something he didn’t understand. The guard watched and sighed through his nose. With a frown, she gestured that he should hold out his hands.
He did as she bade, and she gave him a baseball-sized lump of rice.
They stared at each other, Japanese woman and gaijin.
“Hmph,” she said.
“Arigato gozaimasu, sobo,” Charlie stammered his thanks.
Thank you very much, grandmother.
The other prisoners in the garden gathered around. Charlie divided the rice equally and doled out the shares. He wolfed his, almost swallowing it whole.
He looked for the woman, but she was gone. Wheezing and banging on the ruts, a truck drove out of the base camp and past him into the special branch camp. When they’d finished their work for the morning, they returned to find the dilapidated vehicle parked in the main yard between the barracks. Prisoners crowded around it.
Charlie and Morrison broke into a loping jog, wincing at each step.
Sergeant Sano was handing out Red Cross packages. “Everybody take one. We’re celebrating today.”
The atmosphere was thick with tension. Something wasn’t right. Rusty flinched as he took his package. Maybe they all thought this was just another cruel trick, though no photographers were in sight.
Charlie grabbed his package and scurried away, hugging it to his chest. He tore it open and studied his treasure. Tears quickly blurred his vision. Spam, corned beef, jam, chocolate, cheese, raisins, Wrigley’s Doublemint gum, soap, Chesterfield cigarettes.
The prisoners melted away and headed back to their barracks. Again, that strange sense in the air. They looked terrified.
“Today is a great day for Japan,” Sano said.
Morrison nudged him and pointed with his chin. Beyond the truck, Lance Corporal Chiba was drilling some guards in bayonet attack. One by one, the guards bellowed a war cry and charged to thrust against a dummy roped to a pole.
Except it wasn’t a dummy.
It was the B-24 Liberator pilot’s corpse.
Charlie groaned in horror and backed away from the grinning Sergeant Sano.
“A great day, pilgrim,” Sano repeated. “Your president is dead.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SKILLFUL METHODS
“Why do you hate us?” Nakano asked.
Sitting in the chair across from the interrogator, Charlie hesitated. A new question. He had no rote answer for it and savored the change from the grating routine.
He’d learned to hate plenty of individual Japanese, Sano and the camp commander and Chiba most of all, but he didn’t hate the old woman who’d showed compassion for an enemy. If he didn’t hate her, he couldn’t hate them all.
He chose his words carefully. “I hate Japan’s military government.”
“The State is the people,” Nakano said.
“However you want to put it, you attacked us.”
“However you put it, we were defending ourselves. Unless you think trying to dictate our foreign policy, cutting off our oil, and shipping weapons to China doesn’t count as an attack. None of which was an official act of war, but practically was. We’re fighting to survive as a nation.”
“What I’m saying is the politics don’t matter. We’re at war.”
“Of course. I just find it tiring how much brainwashing you’ve received. Worrisome, even. Propaganda so subtle you absorbed it long before your training. You refuse to acknowledge there might be two sides of this conflict.”
“Actually, I’m worried about you.”
Nakano planted his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands. “Why are you worried about me?”
“I’m ready to give you something. Information you and your high command do not seem to know or recognize.”
“I’m listening.”
Charlie’s lips pulled back into a feral grin. “You’re losing the war.”
Nakano’s face darkened. “Go on.”
“You can’t win. We have more ships, more men, more resources, better technology, and an endless will to fight. We have right on our side. We’re going to wipe every one of your cities off the map. Invade Honshu with tanks and veteran troops. Fight all the way to Tokyo. And after we win—”
“Two million men,” the interrogator snapped. “That’s how many men we have under arms ready to die for the emperor. Behind them, 30 million civilian militia. You’re wrong. We may not win the war, but we won’t lose it.”
“And after we win,” Charlie pressed, “there will be a full accounting. For your government and the Nazis who started an evil war that killed millions around the world. The men who started this will be hanged. Men who beat prisoners to death will be hanged. Men who use the dead bodies of prisoners for bayonet training will be hanged. Men who torture prisoners will be hanged.”
“Do you consider me a war criminal?”
“Hanged,” Charlie repeated.
“You who sank merchant ships and left civilians to die in the sea in violation of the London Naval Treaty. You whose country dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo and killed 100,000 men, women, and children in a firestorm.”
“I did my duty—”
“The fact you were following illegal orders excuses you, is that it?”
“Did my duty, just like the pilot Lance Corporal Chiba murdered and used for bayonet practice. Just like the Americans you torture for information.”
Nakano leered. “We use skillful methods, not torture. Torture is prohibited.”
“Just like we don’t execute war criminals. It’s skillful justice. During your trial, I’m sure you’ll be asked why you hate us. You might even be interrogated with skillful methods first.”
Nakano lit two cigarettes and handed one to Charlie. “I will miss our talks. You may find this hard to believe, but I get a little attached to my subjects.”
Charlie froze mid-reach. “We’re done?”
The man eyed him through a cloud of smoke. “Congratulations. My superiors are far more interested in your bomber squadrons than the war at sea. This was your final interrogation. After today, you’re done.”
From here on out, Nakano would apply his “skillful methods” to captured airmen. And Charlie only had to wait for the end when he’d have the final satisfaction of seeing this smug son of a bitch swing from a rope.
The interrogator rested his cigarette on the lip of his ashtray and opened a file folder lying on the table. “One last thing, though, before you go.”
His cigarette burning forgotten in his hand, Charlie eyed the man warily. He wanted to leave now, bolt through the door, though of course he had no choice.
Nakano said, “It’s about your patrol to the Sea of Japan.”
“I already told you. We went there, we sank ships, we came back. Captain Moreau was in command.”
“It says here we destroyed two of your submarines in the same area that month.”
“We were the only submarine in the Sea of Japan at the time,” Charlie lied.
“Then it must have been your submarine that sank the Roiyaru Maru.”
The name rang a bell, but Charlie’s starved brain couldn’t place it. “I don’t know that ship.”
“She was an ocean liner transporting elements of the 180th Infantry Division, Army of the Greater Japanese Empire. They were going to Manchukuo to join the Kwantung Defense Army.”
“We found a convoy,” he said. “It had two ocean liners in it. The other targets were passenger-cargo ships. We sank both the liners.”
“Including the Roiyaru Maru.”
He hesitated. “If that ship was there, then—”
“Do you recall shooting soldiers in the water?”
The name’s significance jolted him. Charlie remembered the Sandtiger wading into the dying ocean liner’s floating wreckage. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers and sailors huddling in crowded lifeboats or treading water. Men screaming in the dark.
A shot rang out. Then another. The enraged Americans fired back indiscriminately with everything they had. The Bofors joined in with arcing tracer rounds, obliterating a lifeboat. Blood fountained from the boiling sea.
Cease fire, Charlie had roared at the sailors. Stop your firing!
“The soldiers shot at us first,” he told Nakano. “The men fired back. There was confusion. Some of the shots went wild.”
They’d hauled two Japanese out of the water and dumped them on the deck.
They attacked Pearl Harbor, Captain Moreau had gloated. Look at them now.
The interrogator smirked. “There’s that brainwashing again. The fact of the matter is you murdered helpless, unarmed men. Twenty-two, it says in my report. Sinking the ship wasn’t enough for you. You had to massacre the survivors.”
“That’s not true.”
“What did you say happens to those who violate the articles of war?”
Nakano wasn’t a tired bureaucrat interrogating prisoners on an assembly line. He was a keen professional who didn’t give up easily, and he’d done his homework.
And in doing so, he’d won.
“Grady and Morrison weren’t on the boat at the time,” Charlie said. “Percy was below decks and had nothing to do with what happened.”
“And where were you?”
The only way to protect his men was to be honest. “I was on the bridge with the captain.”
Nakano smiled. “And that, among your many other sins, makes you a war criminal by the standards of any nation, even yours.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
B-NIJU KU
The guards buzzed with the latest news. Adolf Hitler had shot and killed himself. Germany had surrendered to the Allies.
In the Pacific, the fighting dragged on.
Rise at dawn. Fold the flea-ridden blanket. Wash at the spigot. Fall into formation at tenko. Calisthenics. Eat a meager breakfast. Mop the barracks. Carry waste from the benjo to the gardens. Eat a few ripening vegetables when the guard wasn’t looking. Pocket two carrots for Rusty and Percy.
The women marched along the road with their water buckets dangling from poles. When Charlie spotted the old woman, he bowed as he did every day now. The woman shook her head as she always did and walked on.
The shining sun warmed his skin. In Europe, the war was over. Weeks had passed since his final interrogation with Nakano. While he’d had sleepless nights over the Roiyaru Maru, nothing came of it.
The guard whistled. Lunchtime.
Over the Hill: a novel of the Pacific War (Crash Dive Book 6) Page 5