Blood Red Sun

by Mertz, Stephen

  “I feel a million years older, and I thought I was a wise guy when I came in,” Mischkie said, looking at the ground. His voice changed slightly. “And after everything I’ve seen in this war, everything that’s happened, all I can see now when I close my eyes is that kid, Evita, catching a bullet back there on Luzon, and the look on her brother’s face the last time we saw him, carrying away her body. I wonder how this tired old world can ever be the same after so much misery.”

  “The future’ll take care of itself,” Hanklin opined. “What I’m worried about is the real near future, like tonight and the next three days. Think there’s much chance of the shit hitting the fan, Sarge?”

  “I’m just a dogface like you, Tex,” Ballard said. “We’re not supposed to think, that’s officers’ work. But the General’s landing a division tomorrow and he wants us going everywhere with him except to the head after he touches down in case that division isn’t enough. I’d say our Supreme Allied Commander expects something to hit the fan.”

  “And that,” said Hanklin with a sigh, “means it’s a long way from over for us.”

  The offices of the Kempeitai were on the third floor of the Ministry of War building.

  At 0200 hours, the gloomy corridors of the central building were tomblike. There was usually some activity even at this hour, but this had lessened each day since demobilization began. The light in Okada’s office was the only one on the building’s third level.

  He sat at his desk, cleaning his pistol. A desk lamp threw a small circle of light that included the desk top and Okada’s bald head. The rest of the office was barely illuminated.

  He tried not to think of what happened after he left the meeting at Baron Tamura’s castle. He must keep his mind clear, he told himself.

  Upon his return to Tokyo, he had visited the House of One Thousand Joys and paid for a whore. He thought of Keiko Tamura as he used the whip on the prostitute. When he was satiated and removed the gag from the young woman’s mouth, he discovered with some surprise that he had killed her.

  There was some trouble because he had gone too far. He had to pay for the removal of the body, and had to bribe the mama-san and three witnesses. It helped that he was Kempeitai.

  Okada could not get lustful thoughts of Keiko Tamura out of his mind; the flawlessness of her beauty, the scent of her, the texture of her skin. His thoughts became feverish whenever he thought of how she would look, naked, strapped to a chair like the whore …

  The footfalls he had been waiting for were coming along the outer corridor toward the office. He finished reassembling the pistol and was putting away the rags when Major Abiko stepped in.

  Abiko was a slender, feminine fellow. Okada and Abiko were of the same approximate age and social class. They had shared this office for the last three years. Okada had always been the more ambitious, but Abiko recognized and accepted this.

  “I have reports from the men maintaining surveillance of General Nagano,” Abiko reported. “General Nagano has had no communication with Baron Tamura or Colonel Hayashi during the past twenty-four hours.” Abiko spoke with a slight lisp.

  Abiko’s men filed hourly reports on Nagano’s movements and telephone conversations. The Kempeitai had spies at every level of the military and government, and Abiko’s men in this case were carrying out standard Kempeitai procedure in monitoring the Eastern Army commander.

  “Excellent,” said Okada. “If there has been no contact between them, it means their plan has yet to be set in motion. When it begins, then they will gather. That was their plan.”

  “I could have Nagano placed under arrest. He could be persuaded to divulge what he knows.”

  “In due time. We shall have use of General Nagano soon enough. What the Baron has planned does not concern me so much as the certainty that something is planned.

  “It is my understanding that you intend to use General Nagano against the Baron. Why do we wait?”

  “We play a most dangerous game, Major Abiko. Baron Tamura misses little. The military secret police could well become suspect in his mind were anything to happen to any member of his group, especially so closely following my withdrawal from their circle.”

  “Still, I wish we could arrest General Nagano. We could make him talk.” A shiver seemed to course through Abiko’s slender frame at the thought. “If General Nagano told us what he knows, we would know exactly what the Baron has in mind.”

  “Ours is to be a quiet rebellion,” Okada continued. “It is the intention of the Baron and his group to arouse the spirit of Bushido throughout the ranks of the military and the populace. With the men we already have in place and by cooperating with General Kurita, supporting his coup instead of the Baron’s, we shall be in a position to exploit both their efforts.”

  The dissatisfaction in the military with the recent turn of events was widespread but hardly coordinated. There had been so many cases in Japan alone of units of army and air force men defying the command to surrender—and of fighting with those units sent to force them to comply—that Okada’s office had only enough resources to investigate a handful of such incidents.

  The Kempeitai major had ordered investigations of any incidents, even rumors, involving commanders of prominence in their private lives, and he added such pertinent information to an ever growing file.

  In the course of one such investigation, he had learned of a rebellion being plotted by General Kurita, of the Second General Army, who commanded a battalion of infantry.

  Okada had nursed dissatisfaction about his association with Baron Tamura’s group almost since the beginning but had kept his feelings to himself until today, determining at the start that playing a more passive role in the Baron’s conspiracy would make it that much easier to gather information on the other participants. It did not take long for the sheer power the Baron commanded to impress Okada.

  But the Baron’s wide-flung sphere of influence had not made him cognizant of the simultaneous coup being planned by Kurita. If the Baron had been aware of this, Okada would have been instructed to investigate.

  Instructed.

  Okada had come to loathe his association with the Baron’s group. They took it as a given that they were far better than he based only on the circumstance of birth. They made no secret of their disdain for working with one whom they considered so far beneath them.

  Okada hated them with a passion.

  He had learned that Kurita was of peasant stock, had worked his way up through the ranks. Okada saw far more advantage in working with someone like Kurita. Kurita had little taste for subtlety. His rebellion would be direct, hard hitting and, Okada reasoned, stood a far greater chance of success than Baron Tamura’s idealistic daydreams. Consequently, Okada stood to gain far more power.

  The key to power, he had well learned during his years with the Kempeitai, was information. Information had won him Kurita’s trust. Okada had kept General Kurita well informed of all pertinent intelligence that would aid in Kurita’s impending coup, and such information had included much about Baron Tamura.

  “We know the details of General Kurita’s plans,” said Abiko. “Can you at least surmise, Major Okada, what Baron Tamura intends?”

  “If I had the joint resources of those men Baron Tamura has gathered about him, I would strike at MacArthur,” said Okada without hesitation. “It would be the ultimate vengeance for Japan.”

  “But time has practically run out. The surrender is scheduled for less than five days from now.”

  “If the Baron succeeds, we succeed,” said Okada. “If they fail and the Americans occupy Japan,” he smiled and the gold tooth sparkled in the light of the lamp, “we will still succeed.”

  “And General Kurita?”

  “Useful for our purposes for the present, nothing more.”

  “If the coup fails,” Abiko pointed out, “by this time next week the Kempeitai will have been disbanded. What then?”

  “Then we return to our homes for perhaps a year or more and t
hen, you and I, Major, and those few we trust, will put our files to use. Those files will bring us money to live well on, and they will give us power no matter who wins.”

  “We will become targets ourselves when we blackmail others.”

  Okada shook his head, having considered this at some length. He had been quietly, methodically building up dossiers on key people in the government and military for some time. He had waited until the preceding week to bring Abiko into it with him. As the Kempeitai became scaled down, it would be increasingly difficult to complete his dossiers without Abiko’s knowledge, since the two of them had been charged with destruction of top-secret files.

  “No one we approach would go to the authorities. They have, to a man, far more to lose than we do if we expose what is in those files.”

  “I grow impatient for it to begin.”

  “It has already begun. You and I have but to wait and bide our time, Major Abiko. Our time will come, and untold power will be ours.

  The brass instruments of the paratrooper band were dazzling beneath an unbelievably blue sky. Not far from the band stood a cluster of officers including Eichelberger, some of his aides, the Japanese liaison, Colonel Tench, and some ranking officers of the 11th airborne.

  Eichelberger had landed ninety minutes earlier. It was 2:15 P.M.

  Ballard, Mischkie, and Hanklin stood together midway between the group of officers and a mob of some two hundred photographers, most of them Japanese although a half dozen allied photogs stood ready, well placed at the front.

  More than five hundred troops of the 11th formed a defense perimeter around an area that included two hangars, directly across the tarmac and cleared of all Japanese military personnel and aircraft, and a ragtag line of vehicles parked on the other side of the band. The troops were very much on the alert for trouble.

  Ballard felt the tension in the air, the apprehension; the fidgeting from the mob of photogs, the off-key, preparatory tootling from the band, the buzz of conversation, and nearly everyone’s eyes on the patch of sky at the other end of the runway.

  Hanklin asked Ballard, “Reckon the General will be on time?”

  Mischkie replied before Ballard could. “This is his last chance to show the world how fearless he is. He’ll be on time. The 4th Marines went ashore this morning to spike the harbor guns on Tokyo Bay.”

  Hanklin brought his eyes down from the sky. He unleashed a spurt of chewing tobacco on the ground a good distance from them.

  “It’s one thing for a batch of marines armed to the teeth to stage a cutting-out operation with Halsey’s battleships giving ‘em cover. This five-star of ours is setting down smack dab in the middle of a nation of folks who were pledged up to two weeks ago to cut his heart out and eat it if they happened to see him.”

  “Here he comes,” said Ballard.

  The fidgeting, the tootling, the human buzz tapered away to nothing. A steady stream of cargo planes continued touching down on the other runways of Atsugi.

  A C-54 came banking in for an approach to the runway, touching down, skidding across the bumpy airstrip to taxi in, the single word Bataan, brightly emblazoned upon its nose, coming to a stop directly in front of the grouped officers. The props coughed and died.

  A ramp was wheeled toward the plane. Ballard and his men moved forward from the sides. The group of officers stepped forward and the mob of reporters came closer, more raucous than before.

  Slowly, the door of the plane opened. The band struck up a lively march.

  Ballard positioned himself close to Eichelberger. Hanklin and Mischkie moved to either side of the bottom of the ramp.

  Paratroopers tightened in to form a cordon around the group of officers, rifles held at port arms.

  Eichelberger saw Ballard and nodded to him.

  MacArthur appeared at the top of the ramp in immaculately pressed khaki, the aviator glasses, the campaign cap, the corncob pipe protruding from above the determined prow of a chin, the pipe and cap set at jaunty angles. He surveyed the scene before him while he lit the pipe at the top of the stairs. Two steps down, a couple of puffs on the corncob was a properly dramatic pause for the cameramen to click and whir away with utter abandon. Then the General descended smartly, the pipe clenched between his teeth.

  At the foot of the ramp, he and Eichelberger shook hands. “Welcome to Japan, General.”

  “Bob, this is the payoff.” MacArthur beamed with high good humor. He turned to Ballard. “Good to see you, Sergeant. How has Japan been treating you and those two ruffians of yours?”

  Ballard lifted his voice to be heard above the band.

  “Kind of quiet until you got here, sir.”

  MacArthur laughed at that. The band finished playing. He strode over to the band leader, the press of photographers now only barely held back by the cordon of paratroopers. MacArthur shook hands with the band leader.

  “Thank you very much. I want you to tell the band that that’s about the sweetest music I’ve ever heard.”

  “Thank you, sir. I will.”

  Ballard spotted Hanklin and Mischkie, their attention on the photographers who continued snapping and filming as MacArthur and Eichelberger conversed with some enlisted men nearby.

  Senior General Headquarters officials began debarking from the plane, practically unnoticed. The group surrounding MacArthur gradually began drifting toward the caravan of vehicles lined up to escort them into Yokohama.

  Only one of the vehicles was in halfway decent shape, a Lincoln Continental of indeterminate vintage. The Japanese had assembled a fleet of decrepit, charcoal-burning sedans and trucks for the rest of the Americans. They were all that could be found amidst the bombed out rubble of Tokyo and Yokohama.

  Personnel scrambled to get organized and board the other vehicles.

  Ballard seated himself in the front of the Lincoln, next to the driver, by prior arrangement. Hanklin went to one side of the car, Mischkie to the other, each hopping onto a running board. The vehicles before and behind the Lincoln filled up with paratroopers. MacArthur and Eichelberger boarded the Lincoln.

  An ancient fire engine leading the procession opened up its siren. There was much wheezing and clanking and uncertain sputtering to life of engines along the line and the procession got under way, following the fire engine through a side gate, onto a dusty road straight as a ruler beneath the punishing sun.

  It was very hot. Ballard was thirsty and sweaty.

  Japanese infantrymen lined either side of the road for as far as the eye could see, a man standing every few feet at parade rest like an endless line of statues, bayonets fixed, mute, stoic in their rigidity, their backs turned to the motorcade as it sailed past.

  MacArthur noted dryly, “I see the Japanese have more than fulfilled their promise to guard the road into Yokohama for us.”

  “Guards,” Eichelberger said, without enthusiasm. “Thirty thousand Nipponese infantrymen!” There was edginess to his voice.

  “Why, we’ve got Sergeant Ballard and his boys to guard us from the guards,” MacArthur said good naturedly. He gazed upon the spectacle passing by. “You’ve noticed, Bob, that their backs are to us.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “A sign of submission and profound respect. Until today, those troops have averted their faces only for the Emperor.”

  “I’ve heard about the discipline of the Japanese,” Eichelberger acknowledged. “I also know that one undisciplined fanatic with a rifle—”

  “Bob, you must develop an appreciation for the Eastern mentality,” MacArthur interrupted gently. “Their dream of a Greater Japan has been crushed. We crushed it. All that’s left for them is their sorrow, and the future. They’ve wept in seclusion, that was part of the reason they wanted those two weeks. Japan will enter tranquilly into its defeat.”

  “Everything counts on that being the case, sir.”

  “Well, in the event it’s not, we do have our Japanese guards and the 11th Airborne in addition to Sergeant Ballard and company.”
MacArthur addressed Ballard. “How would you assess our situation, Sergeant?”

  Ballard had been following the conversation because he had no choice, but his attention was outside the car, watching for snipers in the fields and homes dotting the route.

  “I’d say it’s worth keeping an eye on, sir.”

  MacArthur laughed heartily. “Well put, Sergeant, well put. A man of few words. There are those who wish the same could be said of me.” He spoke again to Eichelberger and some of the humor melted away. “Bob, don’t think for a moment that I don’t appreciate the danger we’re putting ourselves in, but it’s necessary. It’s what the last four years have all been about. This is the greatest adventure in military history.

  “Here we sit in the enemy’s country with only a handful of troops, looking down the throats of nineteen fully armed divisions and seventy million fanatics.” He settled back, the outer mask of serenity returning, to watch the passing scene. “One false move and the Alamo will look like a Sunday school picnic.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Keiko reached the heavy iron door and slid back the bolt. She eased the door inward slowly at first and peered out through the thicket of trees that concealed the passage from the outside.

  She could detect the presence of no one out there, nor in here behind her back beyond the turns and twists of the passageway, except for the squeal and shuffle of unseen rats.

  Good.

  She left the passage and simply stood there for a time, gulping in the fresh air. Two steps more and she froze—the sound of voices was coming her way.

  She could not force herself to step back to the passage. The castle was no place for her any longer. She was free to roam through most of it, as she had always been, but now it was claustrophobic despite its vastness. It was as if the very atmosphere of the place would smother her.

  She crouched behind a tree. Her baggy trousers and a plain blouse would not stand out amid the devastation and suffering she knew she was heading for. Before leaving, she had slipped a dagger—a jewel-handled weapon her uncle had given her years ago for protection—into her purse.