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

by Craig DiLouie

GOODBYES

  Charlie woke, folded his blanket, and washed at the outside spigot for the last time. Today, he would leave Miyazaki Branch Camp for good.

  The beriberi had reduced his gait to a painful shuffle, but he moved slowly because he wanted to savor every moment. It was horrible, all of it, but it was real, and he was alive.

  He wasn’t just saying goodbye to his flea-ridden blanket but all blankets. Nor to the rusty spigot but all spigots.

  To his friends who washed themselves beside him.

  Getting to China meant he’d board a ship. He looked forward to again feeling the sea around him, so deep and full of possibility, and say goodbye to it too.

  He breathed in the hazy air and coughed. The firebombing of Miyazaki had destroyed a quarter of the city. A vast wall of black smoke still hung in the northern sky. Ash still drifted down onto the camp like gray snow.

  Rusty nudged him. Charlie stirred from his reverie and found his comrades staring back. They knew. They were going to the base camp where their chances of survival would be far better than here. He was headed to a certain and horrible death.

  They bowed in the Japanese manner.

  It was the only communication they could risk, though it spoke volumes. Choking back tears, Charlie returned the gesture, saying his final goodbye.

  Sergeant Sano waited at the truck. Nakano leaned against it, smoking a cigarette and looking out of place in his neat business suit.

  Wincing with jabs of pain, Charlie slowly clambered into the back. He gasped in surprise as Morrison climbed aboard and sat beside him.

  “Lieutenant Morrison and I made our own arrangement,” Nakano said. “If you don’t survive the trip, he will take your place. If you do, he’ll come back to enjoy special privileges at the base camp.”

  The gunreibu had taken out insurance on their deal. If Charlie had a change of heart and found a way to kill himself before submitting to General Okamoto’s savage justice, Morrison would suffer in his stead.

  He wondered what kind of special privileges Morrison wanted. It was an awful risk. Charlie didn’t have to take his own life to die on the journey, which promised to be grueling. He was on his last legs.

  As if reading his thoughts, Nakano said, “Don’t take it so bad. You’ll survive the voyage, and your comrades will survive the war.”

  “But you won’t,” Charlie told him.

  The interrogator chuckled. “American grit.” He lit a cigarette, symbolic of execution, and passed it to Charlie. “Enjoy it. It’ll be your last.”

  Two guards climbed into the truck and sat facing him, rifles between their knees. Sergeant Sano patted the vehicle’s side. The charcoal-burning engine started after a series of asthmatic coughs.

  “When we win this war, I’ll get my justice,” Charlie said.

  “Your war is over, pilgrim,” Sano said.

  As the truck drove away and Charlie took in Miyazaki Branch Camp for the last time, he spotted guards marching Rusty and Percy toward the camp gate.

  Nakano was honoring their deal. Charlie prayed they’d make it home.

  The gardens outside the camp thrived in the July sunshine. He bade them farewell too. And thanks for helping to keep him sane.

  The truck trembled and bounced on the rutted dirt track, sending bolts of pain shooting up his spine. Morrison embraced him and squeezed tight to keep him from toppling over. They passed a long column of ragged American prisoners from the base camp, marching toward Miyazaki to help salvage the ruins.

  Then they came upon the women walking along the road with their poles and water buckets. Charlie smiled and raised his hand to the old woman who’d been kind to him. She stopped to stare, steadily dwindling as the truck gained speed.

  He wondered if she’d survive. He wondered if any of them would.

  Just before she dropped out of sight, she raised her hand in farewell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE TRAIN

  The train pounded west then north along Kyushu’s coast, heading to Fukuoka. There, a ship would take them to Manchuria, where General Okamoto of the Kwantung Army dreamed of his revenge against the Sandtiger.

  Charlie had expected to be crammed into a cattle car with animals or materiel. His guards wanted comfort, however, so he found himself sitting on a bench at the rear of a passenger car. Japanese civilians had boarded the rest of the car, briefly eyeing the dirty, ragged Americans before sitting with vacant stares.

  Across the aisle, the guards smoked and played cards. When they appeared sufficiently preoccupied, Charlie risked talking.

  “You’re a damned fool, Morrison.”

  “I could say the same of you, sir,” the lieutenant said. “You took my beating. Then you volunteered for execution so we didn’t have to go. You got us out of that place. I owed you this.”

  “You didn’t owe me anything. You kept my identity a secret under torture.”

  Morrison grinned, revealing a missing tooth. “He got nothing out of me.”

  “You saved me far more grief than I got. And you protected the rest of the men fighting out there in the boats. You did your duty.”

  “Not yet I didn’t. I still owe you a chance to escape.”

  Charlie’s laugh turned into a violent coughing jag. Morrison eyed him with alarm and patted his back.

  “Escape?” he gasped. “Where could we go?”

  “I don’t know, sir. But if the chance comes, I’m taking it.”

  “I did this so you would survive, not get yourself shot.”

  “Surviving isn’t living. If you think I could live with myself after letting you go off and get killed on my behalf, you don’t know me.”

  “For God’s sake.” Charlie didn’t have the energy to argue.

  They chugged through a ruined metropolis. As with Miyazaki, firebombing had leveled huge swathes of it. Here and there, the frames of solitary reinforced concrete buildings stood among vast fields of ash and rubble.

  “Why don’t they just surrender?” Morrison wondered.

  “Would you?” Charlie asked him.

  He respected their tenacity, but after everything he’d suffered, it was hard to pity them. They’d brought this horror on themselves. He might not live to see it, but he’d die knowing the men who’d dragged these people into this horrific war would pay, from Tojo to Nakano.

  The train stopped at a station for passengers to disembark and board. Ash fluttered through the smoky air. Outside, the crowds looked hungry in their dirty overalls, bandanas tied over their blackened faces. The buildings that escaped the bombing and resulting fires were falling apart. Few vehicles were moving.

  Still, the Japanese were busy, endlessly busy. Bombs had smashed the great factories, but Nakano had told him the people toiled in small workshops and even their homes, continuing to build bombs and bullets and war machines for the great struggle.

  Charlie wondered what these people were thinking. Their once-proud empire was dying, their economy strangled, their cities in flaming ruin. They were one step away from famine and invasion.

  He wouldn’t be around to see the end of it, which filled him with regret but also, strangely, relief.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he told Morrison. “I still think you’re a damned fool, but I’m thankful to have you along.”

  “We’re in this together, sir.”

  “No, we’re not in this together. But I’m glad I’m not alone.”

  “Sir, I have to ask you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What Nakano said about the Ryoiyaru Maru. Did it really happen?”

  Through the window, Charlie spied a column of tanks and infantry choking a road that wound through the mountains. Two million men, Nakano had said. Many of them were here, digging in to meet the Americans.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “It happened.”

  Morrison grunted. Charlie guessed what the young lieutenant was feeling. Like Captain Moreau, he held to the simple maxim
that the only good Jap was a dead Jap, but he was enough like Charlie to believe the rules of war trumped everything. Treat the enemy as you wanted them to treat you.

  “What about you, sir? You were there?”

  He remembered screaming at the men. Cease fire, cease fire.

  He said, “I tried to stop it, but it doesn’t matter. Moreau is dead, but that’s not enough for General Okamoto. Somebody has to pay.”

  On Saipan, he’d talked to Jane about karma. What you gave the universe, you got in cosmic balance. He’d cheated death while feeding it thousands of Japanese lives, but death always collected. The universe always righted its invisible scales. Simply put, if you lived by the sword, you were likely to die by it. Hate begot hate, passed on from man to man, an endless cycle of vengeance.

  Maybe he deserved to die to, if nothing else, prevent him from taking part in this perpetual pattern. Because if he had to do it all over again, he might not give the order to cease fire. His suffering had become hate. If he had to do it all over again, he might pick up a rifle and join in. Kill every one of them, just as American bombers were doing every day from the skies.

  He was starting to understand Moreau far more than he ever wanted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE HELL SHIP

  A wide variety of motley marus and a few scarred destroyers crowded Fukuoka’s harbor. These ships crossed the Japan Sea, still the Emperor’s Bathtub, hauling troops and materiel between the home islands and China.

  Standing on the deck of a rusting freighter, Charlie ignored the disheveled vessels as well as the smoke columns rising above the city. Instead, the glimmering blue sea held his rapt attention.

  One of the camp guards shoved him. If Morrison hadn’t caught him, he would have toppled like a bowling pin. Charged with taking Charlie straight to General Okamoto’s doorstep, the guards were coming along for the voyage.

  As for Charlie and Morrison, they were going down the hatch.

  The heat struck them first. Then the stench. Then the moaning.

  For the first time since Charlie had known him, Morrison shuddered in fear. “Jesus Christ. What’s happening down there?”

  “Steady. We’ve made it this far. We can survive this.”

  They descended the ladder into the dark hold. The moaning grew louder. Charlie spared a downward glance and saw hundreds of writhing forms. Waves of heat and stench radiated over him.

  At the base of the ladder, corpses lay on the deck awaiting disposal. Morrison stepped over them and helped Charlie, who was exhausted from the effort of descending the ladder.

  Sitting or lying on the deck or packed into plywood bunks that were stacked against the bulkheads, Allied prisoners crammed the space. Many of them were dehydrated and sick with dysentery. Too weak to move, they soiled themselves where they lay. The decks were slick with human waste. The bulkheads seethed with cockroaches.

  “Stay here,” Morrison said.

  Panting in the heat, Charlie fell to his knees among the dead. Sweat was already pouring off him. The foul air was thin and filled with mist.

  “Captain!”

  “Morrison?” he croaked.

  The lieutenant returned gasping. He was shivering again, this time with revulsion. He kneeled. “Grab me around the neck. I’ll carry you on my back.”

  Charlie clutched the lieutenant, and Morrison grunted and pushed himself to his feet. He hauled Charlie across the deck of squirming bodies until he reached the bulkhead.

  “I found you a bunk.”

  Charlie was about to say he didn’t see an empty berth when Morrison hauled out a dead body and dumped it on the deck. In the cramped space, which was barely large enough to fit him, Charlie lay in the deceased man’s filth.

  The bulkhead hummed as the freighter started its engines.

  “The ship’s getting underway,” Charlie said. Even though he was headed to his execution, it was a relief to be moving.

  “The trip will be over in two days,” Morrison said. “Three at the most.”

  “Don’t let me die. Make sure I get there alive.”

  The man wasn’t listening. Perched on the edge of the bunk and his face buried in his hands, his shoulders jerked with a sob. “Oh, God.”

  “This ain’t nothing,” Charlie told him, remembering Lt. Cotten’s words from Saipan. Whatever Morrison had to deal with, it was temporary. Because it was temporary, it was only an illusion. “It ain’t nothing.”

  “There’s no end to it.”

  The horror, the suffering.

  “You’re going home, Morrison. You’re the bravest son of a bitch I ever met. All you have to do is survive.”

  For Charlie, the end was coming soon.

  “It just goes on and on,” the officer moaned.

  “You’re going to go home and stay in the service and get command of your own boat. You’ll make captain, I know it.”

  Morrison sobbed quietly.

  “Tell me you’re going to survive. That’s an order.”

  The lieutenant wiped his eyes and took a long, jagged breath. “Sorry, sir. I forgot myself for a minute. I’m all right now.”

  Packed like rats in a cage with barely a square yard per man, the prisoners began to shift toward the ladder. The Japanese were lowering buckets of food on ropes. The prisoners’ movement turned into a mad scramble.

  Charlie opened his mouth to speak, but Morrison was already gone. He couldn’t see what was happening past the mass of skeletal forms seething in the gloom. Voices shouted for calm, one of them Morrison’s, countered by angry shouts. Some of the men fought with fists in a blind, mad frenzy.

  Morrison shoved his way back through the throng and crouched in front of the bunk, holding out a ball of rice, which Charlie nibbled.

  He wasn’t hungry, a bad sign, but he forced himself to eat it.

  The lieutenant wolfed down his own rice and offered a water canteen, which Charlie accepted gratefully. He took a long swallow. It tasted like rust, but he savored it. Then he handed the canteen to Morrison, who took his own pull and sighed. They shared it until it was empty, and then Morrison went to take it back.

  The crowd settled quickly after the food was gone. The shouting and madness hung in the air like a psychic echo.

  Charlie closed his eyes and shut it all out, retreating into memories he’d already tread thousands of times during his eight months of captivity. He hoped Nakano honored his promise to get his letter to Evie through the Red Cross. He thought about her, standing on tiptoes on Mare Island’s piers and waving her red bandana over her head. He thought about spending hours in the dark with Jane Larson at the Royal Hawaiian, purging the war with wild lovemaking.

  He’d often fantasized about a future with one, then he’d fantasized about the other, either a calm new beginning or restless roaming. Now, however, he pictured them living full, happy lives without him.

  This fantasy carried him into a deep, dreamless slumber. He awoke to darkness and misery, men crying out in despair and thirst. Another mad scramble for a ball of rice and a canteen. More corpses hauled out along with the waste buckets.

  Exhausted, he slept again. This time, he struggled with fever dreams of depth charges echoing in the deep.

  Morrison shook him awake. “Something’s happening.”

  Charlie raised his head. Was he still dreaming? Tremendous booms sounded through the water. The bulkhead trembled from the shockwaves.

  The lieutenant wore a grim smile. “We’re under attack.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  TARGET

  Whistles blared across the convoy to warn of submarine attack. The freighter’s general alarm wailed. Feet tramped the deck above.

  Charlie pressed his ear against the bulkhead. Metallic groans reverberated through the water. “We got one. It’s sinking.”

  A string of depth charges banged in the deep. Then another sequence of deep booms at eight-second intervals.

  Morrison jumped at the sound. “Our guys hit another o
ne.”

  “We’ve got at least two boats out there,” Charlie said. “Maybe a wolf pack, making a submerged attack.”

  PW ships typically had Geneva crosses on their hulls, the same red crosses hospital ships used. Squadron Commander Cooper had told him the Japanese didn’t. As far as the submarines out there were concerned, this maru was just another merchant freighter. A legitimate target.

  Another two booms in rapid succession, closer this time. Nobody cheered. The prisoners sat in tense, resigned silence.

  The hatches above clanged shut. The Japanese had locked them in. If the freighter went down, they were dead.

  Karma’s last laugh at Charlie Harrison.

  “Do it,” somebody muttered in the dark. “End it.”

  Another string of depth charges.

  Morrison directed his fierce gaze at the bulkhead above. “Kill them all.”

  More booms. Definitely a pack. They were out there, closing in on the convoy like sharks, tearing it to shreds.

  If a full salvo hit the freighter, it would all be over in an instant. Either the torpedoes would kill him outright, or the cold sea would drown him quickly.

  Regardless, death was imminent.

  Charlie’s breathed panicked gulps of air. “Morrison.”

  He clasped the man’s hand. The lieutenant squeezed back as he too anticipated his demise. They wouldn’t die alone.

  “You’re a hell of a submarine officer,” Charlie said. “I’m proud to know you.”

  Morrison clenched his eyes shut. “I learned from the best—”

  WHANG

  The freighter reeled at the impact. The world lurched in the quake. Charlie’s grip broke as a tangle of bodies consumed Morrison and tumbled across the deck.

  Men cried out in the aftermath. Charlie rolled out of the bunk. The deck tilted toward the stern. They were hit. The engines had stopped. The sea was gushing into the lower holds.

  The freighter was dead in the water and sinking.

  “Morrison!”

  The lieutenant staggered from the press of bodies. “Captain!”

  Charlie pointed at the ladder. “Open the hatches!”