Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  “Why attack now? Six months after the end of the war?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know it was over. Our best guess is that the sub had mechanical troubles, ran out of fuel. Kitano says it was headed to the Pacific coast, up near the Washington-Oregon border. Mori was going to blow himself up at a major water supply. Think about it, Connor. Instead of a boatload of people with the Uzumaki, there’d be a city full. Maybe the entire damn United States.”

  SCILLA LED LIAM TO THE COMMANDING OFFICER’S QUARTERS. Four men were inside: the commander of the North Dakota, Admiral Seymour Arvo; Major General Charles Willoughby; and two others that Liam had not met before. Willoughby, looking like a cadaver, ran the show. Liam had heard that MacArthur called him “my pet Fascist.”

  The other two men seemed familiar, but Liam couldn’t place them at first. Then he realized the one with a narrow face and regal features was J. Robert Oppenheimer. The other, with a round nose and probing eyes, was Hans Bethe. Two of the greatest physicists the Americans had. Both key players in the Manhattan Project.

  The men were crammed around a small map table, the surface covered with papers haphazardly arranged. Liam noticed what looked to be equations on many of the sheets. He knew enough physics to recognize Bernoulli’s equation on one. Another had a sketch that looked like a shock wave.

  Oppenheimer looked up. “This our fungal expert?”

  “Liam Connor,” Scilla said. “From Porton.”

  “Tell me,” the regal man said, “what is the maximum temperature a fungal spore can take and still be viable?”

  “Depends on how long it’s hot,” Liam answered.

  “Say a fraction of a second.”

  “I’d say a hundred degrees.”

  “A hundred degrees. You sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure. It could be more. Why?”

  “What about a shock wave?” asked Bethe. His accent was German. “Acceleration of, say, thirty g’s?”

  “Probably wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t affect the spore at all.”

  “What about radiation? Gamma rays?”

  Liam realized what they had planned. “You’re going to blow up the Vanguard with an atomic bomb.”

  “Unless you have a better idea,” Oppenheimer said.

  HITOSHI KITANO WAS HELD IN A SMALL CABIN THAT NORMALLY served as officers’ quarters. Two sailors stood guard outside. Liam was accompanied by one of Willoughby’s aides, a major named Anderson. He said few words but paid close attention, taking notes in a little red notebook.

  Liam’s nerves were on edge. Bethe and Oppenheimer had grilled him for an hour about fungi and spores, trying to decide if a nuclear blast would destroy the Uzumaki or merely launch its spores into the upper atmosphere, where the jet stream would spread them around the world. The odds favored destruction, but the verdict was still out. Liam, in turn, had warned them of the dangers of not acting. If, as he suspected, the culprit was a Fusarium fungus, there was a good chance it could spread around the world without the help of a nuclear blast. Many species of Fusarium could thrive inside the guts of migratory fowl. A bird could be infected and then be a thousand miles away in days. The feathers of birds were a huge risk. They were ideal for carrying spores.

  Kitano stood the moment Liam entered. He was very thin, his clothes hanging on him, his skin stretched over the angular bones of his face. His hands were cuffed together. His right cheek was noticeably swollen. Scilla told him he’d had an infected tooth. He’d refused any treatment, any medications, finally acquiescing to letting them pull it, minus any painkillers. They said he’d barely flinched.

  They introduced themselves politely, Hitoshi Kitano’s English crisp and clear, accented but clearly understandable. Kitano sat with his back perfectly straight in his chair. Though no older than Liam himself, he looked ancient in a way that Liam couldn’t at first quite sort out. It was the eyes, Liam realized. His eyes seemed dead.

  Liam had a number of questions for Kitano. Most prominent was how the Japanese would defend themselves against blowback from the Tokkō missions. Biological weapons were notoriously difficult to control. It was inconceivable to Liam that the Japanese would use a weapon as virulent as the Uzumaki if they didn’t have a way of protecting their own people. If it was a fungus native to Japan, they might be naturally resistant, or have an old folk remedy. Alternatively, scientists at Unit 731 might have developed a preventative, or even a cure. There were no good antifungals, Liam knew. But if you are willing to kill people, you might be able to develop one. You infect a prisoner, you try out a cure. You fail, you try again. If such a program existed at Unit 731, Liam was willing to bet that Hitoshi Kitano knew about it.

  “I am a scientist—a mycologist,” Liam said. “I study fungi. Mushrooms. Molds.”

  Kitano nodded. “My father was also a scientist, an ornithologist. He studied magpies mostly, but he also kept pigeons. My mother said he loved the birds more than her.”

  “My wife has said the same sort of thing. About me and mushrooms.”

  Kitano smiled slightly.

  “I was told that your parents died at Nagasaki. I’m sorry.”

  “Many died. On both sides.” Kitano tilted his head like a bird. “I learned an interesting fact from Professor Oppenheimer. He said that Nagasaki was not the original target. It was Kokura. But it was cloudy in Kokura, so they went on to Nagasaki.”

  Liam tried to imagine what it must feel like to know that your family was dead because of the weather. War was a series of random catastrophes.

  Liam got down to it. “At Unit 731 you worked on the Uzumaki. How did they create the different strains?”

  “I am not a biologist. I was an engineer. I oversaw the tests. My understanding is they had some way to mix the traits. They could change the fungi. Make them adopt the properties of other fungi. They mixed the spores together with special chemicals. I do not know what kind.”

  “Was it acidic? Basic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you wear gloves?”

  “Yes. Rubber gloves. And masks. After we made it airborne.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “We would inject the Uzumaki variants into the maruta, wait for the madness to take hold.”

  “Maruta?”

  “The prisoners were maruta. Logs.”

  “Logs? I don’t understand.”

  “The official story is that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. We were cutting logs. We could have as many logs as we wished. We simply filled out a requisition form.”

  Liam tried to contain his loathing for the man in front of him. The bureaucracy of genocide. It was not unlike the German death camps, the experiments of Mengele. People became chunks of flesh to be manipulated, tortured, disposed of like rats.

  Kitano continued. “After we infected them, we had them breathe on a glass slide. Then the doctors cultivated the spores on the slides. It took many tries, but finally it worked. A variant that was both highly infectious and could be spread by the breath. We called this maruta the Mother. The Mother of the Uzumaki.”

  “How many tries did it take?”

  “Perhaps three, four hundred.”

  “You killed hundreds of people in the tests?”

  “For the Uzumaki, we killed eight hundred and seventeen before we had the breather. But there were many programs like this. We downed approximately ten thousand maruta overall.”

  “Ten thousand? How could you stand it? It’s inhuman. Monstrous.”

  “Perhaps. But the subjects at Unit 731 were well treated, well fed. Not like the other POW camps. Typically we injected them with the pathogen, systematically varying the dose. Then we watched as the disease progressed through them. It was very effective. Different strains could be crossed endlessly, the most deadly variants carefully selected by injecting them into prisoners and culturing the blood of those who died the fastest. After they began to show symptoms, we would take constant readings. Temperature, blood pressure, reaction times. Some we would
dissect.”

  “After they were dead.”

  “No. While they were alive.”

  Liam was aghast. “Why in God’s name would you do that?”

  “To yield the most accurate picture. Anesthetic causes biochemical changes, affects the blood, the organs. As does death.”

  “It’s murder. Sadistic, inhuman murder.”

  “Research, Mr. Connor. Very important research.”

  Kitano spoke as if he was describing the dissection of a frog. Liam took a deep breath, tried to keep his focus. “Who were the subjects?”

  “Some were spies. Others criminals. The rest were Chinese civilians we took from the streets of the surrounding cities. The soldiers would unload the maruta and go back out again.”

  “And then you would kill them.”

  Kitano smiled condescendingly. “This was our task, Lieutenant Connor. Developing new weapons. Testing them. The scientists at Unit 731 were no different from your physicists developing the atomic bomb. Seigo Mori was no different than the American pilot that flew the mission that destroyed Nagasaki.” Kitano leaned forward, cuffed hands on the table before him. “He was a gentle man, Mr. Connor. Everyone liked him. His father was a factory worker who died when he was only three. He often told me stories about his mother and older sister, how they both doted over him, the only man in the house. He wished to be a poet. But he was willing to die.”

  Liam asked the question he’d been waiting to ask. “You must have a way to stop the Uzumaki. To protect Japan.”

  “No.”

  “But if it found its way back to Japan, it would kill millions of your own people. How could you risk that?”

  “We had no choice. The Uzumaki was the last resort. To be used when everything else was lost. When Japan had nothing left to lose. The Uzumaki is—how do you say it?—a doomsday weapon. Once released, it cannot be stopped.”

  A PAIR OF SAILORS ON DECK ON THE NORTH DAKOTA POINTED UP.

  Liam followed the path of their gaze but saw nothing but clear blue sky. He was talking to Scilla about what he’d learned from Kitano. Scilla, in turn, was telling Liam about the latest developments on the Vanguard, and the news wasn’t good. The captain was keeping everyone belowdecks to minimize the risk of the spread of the Uzumaki, but a group of sailors, almost certainly infected, had stolen guns and were holed up topside on the foredeck. They’d already killed three other sailors who’d tried to stop them. Liam was incensed that they were out in the open. Sooner or later, a spore would catch an air current, drift across the water, and infect one of the other ships.

  Liam continued to study the patch of sky that the sailors were pointing to. It took a good minute before he saw it.

  At first it was hardly more than a black speck moving slowly across the wide expanse.

  “No,” Liam said. “No. No. No.”

  Scilla grabbed a pair of binoculars. “It’s a damned goose,” he said.

  They were hundreds of miles from any landfall. They could go days without seeing a bird. But the bastard was headed straight for them. “Go,” Liam said. “Get out of here.”

  Liam looked across the open water to the USS Vanguard. On the foredeck, the siege continued against the sailors who’d broken free and come out into the open. A group from amidships launched an assault, the sailors firing back, screaming expletives. They were completely mad.

  Scilla was dead still, watching the goose through the binoculars. “Keep going,” he said.

  Liam could make out the goose’s features now, the broad wingspan, the slow beating of the wings. Closer and closer it came, still high overhead but dropping slowly. Liam tried to will it away. “Keep going,” he murmured. “Keep flying.”

  The goose didn’t listen. It did the worst thing possible. It turned toward the Vanguard, then descended in spirals of decreasing radius, a narrowing gyre. Both men watched it drop, stall, and finally settle gently onto the deck of the USS Vanguard.

  “Damn it!” Scilla said.

  Liam watched through binoculars as one of the men on the Vanguard leveled a gun at the bird.

  “No, no, no,” Liam yelled, as if he could be heard across the expanse of ocean separating the two ships. “Get a tarp. Try to cover it.”

  The soldier shot, missed.

  The goose flew away.

  A FAST CRUISER AND A DESTROYER WERE DISPATCHED TO chase the goose, staying in continuous radio contact. They were barely able to match the bird’s speed running wide open, thirty-five knots. The destroyer even fired its four-inch guns at the bird, a ridiculously futile effort, like trying to shoot a fly with a rifle. It would have been laughable if the stakes hadn’t been so high. By the time they got the Vought OS2U Kingfisher scout planes in the air, the goose had disappeared into a cloud bank, and it hadn’t been seen since.

  A quiet descended over the ship. The chase boats plied the waters, searching for the errant goose, the Kingfishers buzzing overhead. Calls had been put out, scrambling planes from Tokyo to join in the search.

  Willoughby was nearby, his face red, talking to a major. “Imagine if the Russians have this,” he said. “The Russians were the first into Harbin. What if one of these cylinders ends up in Stalin’s hands? You think Uncle Joe wouldn’t use it?”

  They were caught. If they did nothing, sooner or later the Uzumaki would spread beyond the confines of the Vanguard, either by a bird or spores carried by the wind. If they blew the ship up, they killed hundreds of men and ran the risk of spreading the Uzumaki even more widely. It was a devil’s deal.

  Liam stared across the half-mile that separated them from the Vanguard. The screams of the infected sailors carried over the water.

  If the Uzumaki was a doomsday weapon, a single goose could be the beginning of a catastrophe on a historic scale. The world had just survived the most brutal, destructive war in history. Could the worst be yet to come?

  No.

  The Japanese must have a way to protect themselves. Liam couldn’t believe otherwise. An entire nation doesn’t commit suicide. And if they had a cure, Kitano knew about it. Kitano was hiding something—Liam sensed it. And he had an idea how to find out what it was.

  He went below, to the room where Kitano was kept. Kitano had been forgotten in the goose excitement, left with a lone guard outside his door.

  The guard stopped him. “No one’s allowed inside.”

  “I’ve got authorization,” he lied.

  “From who?”

  “Willoughby.”

  “I wasn’t told.”

  “Everyone’s worried about the goose. It must’ve got dropped. You want me to—”

  “No. It’s okay.”

  LIAM TOOK A SEAT ACROSS FROM KITANO.

  “A goose landed on the Vanguard, then took off again. There’s a good chance it’s infected. It was last seen going north.”

  No reaction. Kitano was exactly the same, the dead eyes, the even demeanor.

  “Japan is to the north. That goose is headed toward Japan.”

  No reaction.

  God damn it. Why wasn’t he reacting? The goose could easily find its way to Japan, a thousand or so miles to the north. It would devastate Japan. Why wasn’t Kitano upset?

  Liam pushed him again about the Uzumaki, listened carefully as the grim-faced man told the same stories about the tests. At Liam’s insistence, Kitano carefully described every experiment he saw or heard about at Harbin. It was grisly, horrifying, and useless. Kitano described nothing that sounded like a trial for a vaccine or a cure. Only death after death.

  Kitano stopped. “You realize you are wrong. There is no cure.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He saw something flicker in Kitano’s eyes. “Let me tell you about our tests at Ningbo, on the eastern coast of China, south of Shanghai. We used low-flying airplanes that dropped wheat laced with bubonic plague. With standard bubonic plague, nine in ten who contract the disease die. With the strain released on the people of Ningbo, ninety-nine out of one hundred died.”<
br />
  “What is your point?”

  “Seven of the team from Unit 731 were among the dead. The researchers contracted the disease themselves. They died. Ishii had no cure for bubonic plague. But that did not stop him. It did not stop us. We are not afraid to die, Mr. Connor. You must understand that, if you are to understand us.”

  Liam studied Kitano, tried to look into his soul. Kitano was right—the entire nation of Japan worshipped death. Glorified it. Maybe it was true. The Japanese had shown time and time again an utter insensitivity to losses on their own side. Could they have launched these attacks with no cure? The Uzumaki was the ultimate Tokkō mission. The suicide attack of a nation, in order to bring down the entire world.

  He stayed after Kitano, asking more questions. “Did any of the Tokkō ever mention a name besides Uzumaki?” No. “Did you ever see them take any medication? Anything?” No. “Aspirin?” No. “A powder?” No. “Anything?” No.

  Liam had asked all these questions before. He felt as though they were stuck on a wheel, spinning around and around, twirling questions without getting any closer to the answer.

  He stared at Kitano, his thin features, cheek swollen from his removed tooth. Then, apropos of nothing, two separate images came to him. The first was of an autoclave, a machine for sterilizing biological equipment.

  The second image was of the medic handing out the penicillin tablets. They were of no use. The Uzumaki wasn’t bacterial. It was fungal.

  A glimpse of the hem of the secret.

  Liam chased the idea, followed it through. Penicillium. The most famous fungus in the world. In the early part of the war, thousands of soldiers died from bacterial infections. But after the Americans learned to mass-produce penicillin in 1943, Allied soldiers stopped dying. The antibiotic had an enormous impact on the war effort. Hardly an American or British soldier had not taken the drug by the time the war was over.

  The Japanese had no penicillin. The Japanese died.