Blood Red Sun

by Mertz, Stephen

  The driver steered the jeep to a stop directly in front of the three, blocking their path. The driver was a young second lieutenant. He regarded them from behind reflector sunglasses. The jeep engine idled.

  “Is one of you men Ballard?”

  “I’m Ballard.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Stilwell from General Headquarters. I’ve been instructed to locate you and bring you in ASAP. The people at your office told me you were heading over this way. Climb aboard, Sergeant.”

  “Mind telling me who wants to see me so much that they sent a chauffeur to pick me up?”

  Stilwell bristled at that, a tightening of the line of his mouth.

  “General MacArthur sent for you. Now get a move on, Ballard. That was ASAP.”

  Hanklin whistled. “Dugout Doug himself. Damn, Sarge, I am impressed.”

  “So am I,” said Ballard. “I either pulled a really smart move without knowing it or a real fuckup to get this kind of attention. Any idea which, Lieutenant?”

  “Afraid not.” Stilwell had a nasal voice but he was trying hard to strike a note of command. “We’re through talking. Climb aboard. That’s an order.”

  Mischkie’s eyes narrowed at Stilwell’s tone.

  “You want us to tag along, Sarge?”

  “You weren’t invited, dogface,” said the lieutenant. “Cool down or you’re headed for the brig.”

  Hanklin’s response to that was to raise his fists. The knuckles were bruised, dotted with flecks of blood.

  “We go where we want to go when we’re off duty, Lieutenant, and sometimes we like to jump up and down on fellas who think they can tell us otherwise. And right now we’re off duty.”

  “Belay that, both of you,” said Ballard. “This man’s only doing his job.” He hoisted himself aboard the jeep, into the passenger seat. “Drive on, Lieutenant. Wouldn’t want to keep a general waiting.”

  Chapter Two

  From this altitude the world was a yawning panorama of clouds and sunlight. The droning engine noise of the plane in flight was music to Keiko Tamura. The windy turbulence of the open cockpit enveloped her senses.

  She understood it was a measure of how preoccupied Baron Tamura was that he had allowed her to pilot the plane on what had become their daily flight together.

  As if by leaving the ground and taking wing they could escape their world and what it had become. Sometimes, she reflected, it almost seemed as if one could. It was an escape, however temporary, up here in a German-made biplane from the last war.

  Her uncle had purchased the Spad from a German associate between the wars. The relic was kept in perfect flying condition and was equipped with a machine gun and a radio, though as a rule the Baron insisted on maintaining radio silence when they went aloft.

  She wished the old plane had enough fuel capacity to take them to the other side of the world. Any place where there was not war.

  A formation of high-flying birds soared out of their path. The plane was over the southern coast of the Boso Peninsula. From up here, across the expanse of Tokyo Bay through the haze of humidity, they could see the full breadth of destruction from the Tokyo plain through Kawasaki to Yokohama, a soul-sickening panorama of charred wood and ashes with scarcely a building left standing, the results of the raids by American bombers. It was the same at Osaka, Nagoya, and Kobe, and the fiery horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by all accounts defied description and imagination. There were rumors the Americans had a third bomb and would drop it on Tokyo.

  She brought her eyes back up to the sky and worked the control stick, banking the Spad gracefully in a wide loop for the return trip to the airfield.

  Baron Tamura could have had his choice of the Zeroes remaining at Tateyama airfield, even now, this close to the end with resources so depleted, but her uncle had never lost his fondness for the old Spad, and neither had she.

  It was the plane he had taught her to fly when she was sixteen, when the world was a brighter place and it felt good to be alive.

  So long ago.

  Keiko Tamura was two months past her twenty-fourth birthday. Small-boned and slim-figured, she stayed in good physical condition through a vigorous regimen of daily exercise. She wore a flight suit, a leather flight cap, and aviator goggles.

  Her mother had died in childbirth; her twin sister was stillborn. Her father had been a professional officer in the army and had died in the Manchurian campaign in 1931 when the militarists were first gaining power in Japan. Keiko was thirteen at the time. The Baron, her father’s brother, had raised Keiko from childhood. She was his only living blood relation. He doted on her from the beginning. He became as her father and she, as his daughter, and throughout her growing years he was her mentor.

  Before the war, she thought again.

  So very long ago.

  The airfield came into view in the distance. She worked the control stick, decreasing altitude, wondering what so preoccupied her uncle that he allowed her to pilot the Spad today. It was a pleasure he nearly always reserved for himself whenever they had flown together over the years.

  She had been attending classes at the University of California in Los Angeles, majoring in journalism, until two weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her uncle had instructed her to return home at once. As a good daughter of Japan, she had obeyed his summons. She had been experiencing a restlessness during that year of her studies, a restlessness to return home to contribute what she had learned in America to those causes she felt compelled to join in her own country.

  There had been a struggling women’s movement in prewar Japan, a struggle for workers’ rights and the right to vote. She had known nothing of the impending hostilities until hearing the broadcasts of the military bragging of the Americans’ defeat, which had been greeted roundly with approval by a populace by that time sharing in the mad dreams of their leaders. The hopes of Japanese women who had dared to dream of something better were quickly trampled to dust. She was assigned as a typist in the war ministry.

  Three days ago she had been released from duty abruptly, without explanation. The Baron denied that it was his doing when she confronted him about it, but she could not rid herself of the suspicion that, as when he had summoned her home in the final weeks before Pearl Harbor, he knew things which she and most of the world did not.

  She insisted on being allowed to make some sort of contribution, and so he had agreed to take her as his “assistant,” although she was aware that most of his business interests had been destroyed by American bombing. The workers had fled to the hills and there were no more raw materials.

  This was her second day on the “job.” Yesterday had consisted of the Baron dictating three or four formal business letters after a morning flight, and she assumed today would be much the same.

  She glanced into the small mirror mounted at the side of the cockpit. The mirror was to provide a means of communication between pilot and passenger, but at this moment the Baron’s interest was riveted on some point outside the cockpit.

  Baron Tamura was fifty-six years old. He had the prominent forehead and ascetic, finely lined features of a scholarly aristocrat, dominated by strangely compelling, piercing eyes. He was taller than the average Japanese man and despite his age, his lean body was muscular. The Baron had ingrained in Keiko, early in her life, a love of athletics and a passion for physical fitness.

  Their eyes met in the mirror and he pointed. She looked in the direction he indicated and realized it was she who had been preoccupied.

  An American B-29 bomber was a tube of silver in the distance, cruising high above them as it headed on a northwesterly course over the Bay. A course that would place it over Tokyo within minutes, she realized. She thought of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the rumors of more to come. She did not know what to do. Tokyo was only fifty kilometers away. Should she land or stay aloft? The bomber so far above and away shrank to a silvery pinpoint and disappeared into the hazy distance.

  She glanced at the mirror again and caught the
Baron’s reflection. He did not appear overly concerned. His impassive expression showed no alarm whatsoever. He gestured ground-ward. She nodded. They were approaching the airfield.

  On landing she taxied to where a ground crew waited before the Baron’s personal hangar at a remote corner of Tateyama Air Base. As she cut the motor, the plane sputtered and coughed to silence. She peeled off her goggles, ran fingers through her hair. The air on the ground was stifling, far more muggy and uncomfortable than it had been thirty minutes earlier when they took off.

  The Baron abruptly stalked off toward the hangar. She hurried to keep apace with his brisk step.

  There had been no loud roar, no fiery flash, no rising mushroom cloud from the direction of Tokyo.

  “Uncle, for a moment I thought—”

  “That the American barbarians had come to destroy Tokyo as they did Nagasaki and Hiroshima?” He shook his head. “The B-29s observed before the destruction of those cities flew at extremely high altitudes. The bomber we saw was flying lower than is customary for such a plane. It is perhaps a reconnaissance flight. I intend to find out. Wait for me here.”

  He started to angle away from her, toward a wall phone inside the hangar.

  She touched his arm. “Uncle, wait. We must talk.”

  “My dear, we have all day to talk. I must make a call. I will be but a minute.”

  “I want to know what troubles you so.”

  “For you to know would do neither of us any good, child.”

  “There is something, then.”

  “I but dwell on what is happening to Japan. I grieve for what is lost.”

  “There is more. Please, Uncle, tell me.”

  “Your concern is admirable, my child. Your persistence is not. I must make a call.”

  She watched him cross to the telephone. He stood there with his back to her and made his call, out of earshot, leaving her to think.

  Baron Tamura had lost his wife and children in the 1923 earthquake and never remarried. He had taken over the family munitions business and he exerted considerable political influence because of his position and wealth. He was treated at the airfield as if he were a senior officer, and he knew things beyond the ken of wealth and position alone, such as his knowledge about the planes that had bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

  There had been no official reports, only acknowledgement that those cities had been destroyed by the enemy and that the enemy had employed some awesome new weapon.

  She had heard whispers at the war ministry before she left. One bomb was said to have destroyed each city.

  One bomb.

  It was said the lucky ones were those who died instantly. Survivors of the initial blast were said to have died by inches, the flesh falling from them; convulsions, their insides oozing from every body opening.

  The Baron returned and what he saw in her face caused him to inquire with sudden concern, “Keiko, what is it?”

  She blinked away the nausea that wanted to rush up from inside her.

  “I, too, grieve for what is lost, Uncle.”

  A touring car was parked alongside the hangar, a liveried chauffeur holding open the back door, awaiting them.

  “Come, Keiko, we are finished here,” said the Baron. “Let us return to the castle.”

  Chapter Three

  Marquis Kido responded to a knock at his office door with a curt, “Enter.”

  His windows overlooked the trees and thick foliage of Fukiage Garden next to the waters of Chidoigafuchi Pond. The grounds of the Imperial Palace had been cleared of most signs of the May 25 air raid that had wrought heavy damage.

  Kido’s assistant entered the room breathlessly and placed a piece of paper on the desk before Kido.

  “I thought it best that you see this at once, Marquis Kido. An American bomber is dropping them across the city.”

  Kido picked up the leaflet and scanned it.

  “But this is terrible. It is the text of our acceptance of the Allied terms of surrender.”

  “Some will undoubtedly fall into the hands of the military.”

  Kido, a small, compact man in his fifties, was not given to displays of emotion, but he crumpled the leaflet into a ball in his clenched fist.

  As Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Marquis Kido was in nearly every respect the Emperor’s contact with the outside world and his Royal Majesty’s principle contact between the Emperor and those, in the government and military, who served him. He was the Emperor’s chief advisor.

  An allied ultimatum had been accepted four days earlier but knowledge of this had been strictly contained within a small circle of the government. The Supreme War Council and the Cabinet were bitterly divided to the extent that the nearly unheard of personal intervention of the Emperor himself had not shaken the resolve of General Anami, the War Minister, and his Chiefs of Staff. They held out passionately for negotiations with the Americans insisting on no enemy occupation, allowing the Imperial Armed Forces the right to disarm and demobilize themselves, and allowing war criminals to be tried by Japanese courts. The Premier, the Foreign Minister, and the Navy minister realized all was lost and were for accepting the unconditional terms. It was a deadlock.

  “What do the Americans gain by informing the people that surrender is near?” the assistant asked. “Why should they not want us to divulge such information at such time as we deem appropriate?”

  “They think we procrastinate, that perhaps we are reconsidering,” said Kido. “They hope to stir public sentiment that would sway us to accept their terms. They do not appreciate that we must deal with a military capable of mutiny.” He unfolded the leaflet and reread it. “And now, this. This will make at least the attempt of a coup d’état inevitable. We should have expected no less, asking the unbeatable Japanese Army to admit defeat; asking officers who have been taught that surrender is dishonorable, to surrender.”

  “It is said, sir, that the war minister himself contemplates throwing in with a coup attempt.”

  “General Anami is not a risk. His conscience will not allow him to defy his Emperor. It is the young officers, Hatanaka and his clique, that we must worry about. They hope through their conspiracy to pressure His Majesty to reverse his decision to surrender. An uprising by the entire army, an Imperial change of heart, a continuance of the war … this must not be allowed to happen. Telephone Grand Chamberlain Fujita at once. Tell him it is imperative that I meet with His Majesty.”

  Lieutenant Stilwell braked to a stop in front of the Manila City Hall. The main entrance to City Hall was flanked on one side by blossoming sampaguita, the national flower, and on the other by a sandbag-encircled machine gun placement. Ballard and the officer left the jeep and were promptly passed through, into the building, by sentries posted on the front steps.

  The elevator deposited them on the top floor of General Headquarters, which was abustle with the clacking of typewriters and dozens of simultaneous conversations. Officers and enlisted men of every rank hurried here and there.

  Stilwell led the way to a frosted glass door with the legend Supreme Allied Commander stenciled upon it. He ignored the orderly seated behind a desk in an outer office and went directly to a heavy oak door, upon which he knocked discretely. He opened the door enough to put his head through, then withdrew and stepped to one side.

  “Go on in, Sergeant.”

  Ballard did so. The door closed behind him. Stilwell remained in the outer office.

  Three generals were waiting for Ballard in the inner office, one in each of the armchairs angled toward a desk while MacArthur himself was seated behind the desk.

  Ballard faced the Supreme Allied Commander. He snapped a salute.

  “Sergeant John Ballard reporting as ordered.”

  MacArthur made a small production of closing a file he had been studying, his brow furrowed. The only out-of-place item on his desk was a soda fountain milkshake glass, with the remains of an ice cream soda, the straw bent for easy sipping. MacArthur looked up with an imperious gaze.
Seated, he presented no less a Barrymore-like persona than he had in the newsreels striding ashore from a landing craft on the first day of the invasion. He acknowledged Ballard’s salute with a gesture somehow offhanded yet crisply precise.

  “Good morning, Sergeant. At ease. Have a seat. Smoke if you care to.”

  Ballard assumed parade rest. “I’ll stand if it’s all the same, sir.”

  “Suit yourself, Sergeant.” MacArthur indicated the men. “Generals Krueger and Eichelberger, Sergeant Ballard.”

  “I read Stars and Stripes, sir. I know who they are.”

  After a pause, Krueger said to the others, continuing a conversation in progress as if Ballard were not present, “I don’t know, General. We may be banking too much on a long shot. This is our last chance to nix it.”

  Eichelberger said, “I’d like to hear what the sergeant thinks of our idea.”

  “By all means.” MacArthur reached for a pipe in the glass ashtray on his desk. He placed the stem in the corner of his mouth and leaned back, propping an elbow on his chair. “Sergeant, your 201 file says you’ve been riding a desk these past five months. Tell me, honestly. Do you miss the fire?”

  “Now and then, sir.”

  “Every one of those thirty-seven hundred P.O.W.s held at Santo Tomas University owes something to you and your men.”

  Two motorized task forces from the 1st Cav, covered by Marine Corps fighter aircraft, had dashed ahead of the division during the invasion. Ballard and his unit had been in the thick of it, engaging heavy resistance to free emaciated, hollow-eyed prisoners held by the Japanese at the University in Manila, survivors of the Bataan death march.

  “I lost two men that day, sir, out of a five-man team.”

  “Do you feel a personal guilt over that, Sergeant?”

  “They were good men. It was my team.”

  “You and Mischkie and Hanklin are all that’s left of that unit,” said Eichelberger. “See much of them anymore?”

  “In the bars and cathouses every now and then, sir.” Krueger cleared his throat.