by Max McCoy
Indy moaned.
"Oh, I bet it hurts."
"The woman," Indy muttered. "The girl."
"They're safe on board," the doctor said. He tied off the knot, then admired his handiwork and took a slug of gin. "Or, as safe as they can be with Captain Snark in command."
"Are we at sea?"
"We're still in port," the doctor said.
"Where are we bound?" Indy asked.
"Don't you know?" the doctor asked and smiled, revealing a mouthful of neglected teeth. "Japan."
"No—"
The doctor pulled Indy up, then began to wrap a bandage around his chest and shoulder.
"We've got to get off this boat," Indy said.
"Brother," the doctor said, "you and me both."
Indy grimaced.
"I've got to go," Indy said. "The magician and her daughter are safe. I've got other places to go. But I'm so... tired."
"It's the loss of blood, mate."
"Maybe I'll just rest here for a few minutes," Indy said. "You know, gather my strength. Wake me in time to jump ship."
There was a knock on the door of the infirmary.
"Come in," the doctor said. Then, to Indy: "Relax."
Faye and Mystery walked in. Faye was dressed in a black robe tied with a red sash, while Mystery wore the dark blue uniform and cap of a Japanese merchant sailor.
"How is he?" Mystery asked.
"Not bad," the doctor said, "for a sixty-year-old man."
"I turn thirty-five this year," Indy said.
"That's different," the doctor said. "He'll live, but you've got to consider the material I had to work with. This guy's got more holes in him than a screen door."
"Thank you, Albert Schweitzer."
"Who?"
"Never mind," Indy said.
The doctor shrugged as he picked up his tools. "This boat's headed to Japan," Indy said. "I'm leaving, just as soon as I catch my wind. You've got to get off, too."
"We will," Faye said. "At the first opportunity. But we must stay put for now. It will be high tide in an hour, and that's when we're scheduled to sail."
"That's my cue to go," Indy said and struggled up. Then he paused. "What are you dressed up for, a Halloween party?"
"The clothes?" Faye asked. "We thought we'd better change. The only women normally found on freighters like these have been kidnapped into prostitution. Thousands have been taken from across Asia, of all nationalities."
"What's your story?" Indy asked Mystery.
"I always dress as a boy," she said.
"It's safer that way," Faye explained. "At least while she still has the build to get away with it."
Indy nodded.
"Come on," Faye said and helped Indy off the table. "You don't want to go back ashore at Luchow. Let's get you to a bunk, so you can rest. I'll wake you if anything happens."
Indy had just closed his eyes when the door to the cabin burst open, followed by a bayonet with a rifle and a Japanese soldier on the other end.
The soldier spoke loudly and rapidly in Japanese and made rapid, jerking motions with the bayonet. Indy didn't know what he was saying, but it was obvious that he wanted Indy off the bunk.
Indy swung his feet over the edge of the bunk, but his head was spinning so badly that he followed them right to the deck. The doctor appeared in the doorway, slipped past the soldier, and helped Indy back onto the bunk.
"Glug, glug," the doctor said and mimed tipping a bottle.
The soldier laughed.
A sergeant appeared behind the soldier, and he was not amused.
He asked the doctor what was wrong with the American. The doctor told him in Japanese tortured by a New Zealand accent that the sailor was Australian, had gotten blind drunk that night, and had foolishly wound up on the wrong side of a knife fight with a three-hundred-pound Malay.
The sergeant spat.
"All gaijin look alike to me," he said as he hitched up his trousers. "Their feet are too big, their voices too loud, and they all smell like rotten hamburger. We have orders to search all of the ships leaving harbor tonight for a big, ugly American with a gunshot wound and a female magician and her apelike assistant."
"Knife, not gunshot," the doctor said. "Besides, his name is Smith and I was at the Orchid when the fight started. If I had not been, he wouldn't have been around to cuss me in the morning."
The sergeant reached beneath Indy's unbuttoned shirt and was about to lift the dressing when another soldier carried Faye down the corridor and into the room. Captain Snark was on their heels.
"Bring her back," Snark ordered.
"No," Faye shrieked. "Get me off this boat. This pirate has kidnapped me and intends to sell me into prosti—"
The sergeant backhanded Faye, hard enough that it split her lower lip. For a moment, she swayed, the silk gown began to slip from her shoulders, and Indy thought she would pass out. Then she gathered herself, wiped the blood from her mouth, and gave the sergeant a cold smile.
"I was hoping you were here to rescue me," she said.
"Shut up, please," he said in thick English. "You make good comfort woman. No take you away."
"Domo arrigato," Snark said, and allowed the sergeant a slight, nearly imperceptible bow.
The sergeant grabbed Indy's jaw in his beefy hand and turned his chin to the left, and then to the right, while he inspected the cuts and bruises. Indy refused to focus on his piglike eyes, but he was not spared the sergeant's stinking breath.
"This is not the gaijin we are looking for," the sergeant said in Japanese. "This one stinks of gin and is obviously too stupid to have escaped the provincial jail."
Then he shoved Indy back down on the bunk, turned toward the door, and with a wave of his hand ordered the soldiers after him. Suddenly he stopped, grasped Faye by the waist, and pulled her roughly toward him. He give her an exaggerated kiss on the lips, then released her and slapped her bottom.
Indy was off the bunk and halfway across the cabin when the doctor grabbed him. "This fight is not worth dying for, mate," the doctor whispered as their footsteps echoed down the hall. "Let them leave. When that bloke is dying in some trench at the hands of a bloodthirsty Chinese warlord, or blind from syphilis at having taken comfort once too often at a well poisoned by his comrades, we'll be having a drink to his stinking memory at the International Hotel in Tokyo. Do you know the place?"
"I know it," Indy said.
"Across the street is the white-walled castle of the emperor," the doctor said. "Ducks and geese swimming peacefully in the moat. Every once in a blue moon you can get a glimpse of the Hirohito himself, a small man in a great hat and tails who, I think, would rather be a gardener. Not too ambitious for a living god, eh?"
Indy looked at the doctor in admiration of his ability to soothe with his voice and his appreciation for the beautiful amid the chaotic.
"Surprised? I wasn't always a wreck with ruined teeth and cyanotic hide," he continued as he turned to Faye and inspected her bleeding lip. "I've had a succession of careers—journalist, lawyer, doctor. Well, not really a doctor, but I will pass for one in these latitudes. I used to sit at the bar at the International Hotel, drinking saki from those little ceramic cups, congratulating myself on my civility and watching the world slip away. A little like the emperor."
"How so?"
"Japan is such a damned fine island, and look at the wretched hands it is in now. But we did it to ourselves, didn't we? You know, the Japanese even gave up the gun once, after the Portuguese brought it four hundred years ago. But Nippon has managed to become just as modern and bloodthirsty as the rest of us. The world is at war again, but most folks don't know it yet—it began here, two years ago, and nobody cares. Well, mate, they will."
He produced some swabs and antiseptic from his medical bag.
"This is going to hurt, but I wouldn't want to chance where that brute's knuckles have been today," he said as he dabbed at Faye's lip.
"What happened to you?" Indy asked.
"I woke up," he said. "And I couldn't stand it. I know what is coming, because I learned this business of patching people up as a corpsman during the Great War. So I became a drunk, and now I pass my time pretending to practice medicine on a rusting hulk captained by a Japanese smuggler. Tending war orphans in Manchuria while Snark is out gathering whatever illicit cargo he can find."
"Pretending?" Indy asked and felt his wound. "Now you tell me."
"Well, most of it came back to me," he admitted as he finished ministering to Faye's bottom lip, now stained with iodine.
"What's your name?" Indy asked.
"Bryce." When he spoke the name, he seemed to grow a little taller. "Montgomery Bryce, Oxford, class of 1923."
"Jones," Indy said and held out his hand.
They shook.
"Yes, I know," Bryce said. "I've seen your mug in the newspapers. But a gentleman doesn't comment until the introductions have been made."
Then there was a jolt, and Bryce smiled as he steadied himself against a bulkhead. "Ah, we've cast our moorings. The tugs are taking us out into the harbor. Soon we'll be rid of this stinking piece of real estate."
"What is Snark carrying this trip?"
"He doesn't confide in me," Bryce said.
He knelt on the floor, closed up his bag, then looked at Indy and gave him a glance that was filled with an unspeakable mixture of horror and guilt.
"You know, Jones, it's quite true what I said," he said. "But it's not the whole cloth. While pretending not to see the rape of Manchuria, I fell in love with the concubine of a petty warlord collaborating with the Imperial Army. The girl's name was Si Huang, she was seventeen, and she was the most gentle creature I have ever known. But honor bound her to her station in life; she would not flee to safety with me. The warlord, of course, found out. Do you know what he did?"
Indy closed his eyes.
"He killed her. Then he cut out her heart, cooked it up, and had it mixed into the curried pork I ate for my dinner that night."
The doctor gave a smile that projected no mirth.
"I have never eaten a bit of meat since," he said as he snapped his bag closed. "And just before I nod off to sleep at night—that is, if I'm sober—I will get a little whiff of curry, and the night terrors close behind."
The Kamikaze Maru—the Divine Wind—had been at sea for nearly ten hours when the pair of Kawasaki Ki-10 biplanes appeared on the horizon over her wake. Indy had heard the drone of the big radial engines, and he knew they could mean nothing but trouble.
He had slept in his clothes, so to finish dressing meant grabbing his hat and jacket on the way out of the cabin. It was dawn now, and the eastern sky was bronzed by the rising sun.
As Indy reached the bridge, the biplanes buzzed the ship.
Snark was on the deck, watching through a pair of binoculars as the planes flared and prepared for another pass. Faye, Mystery, and Bryce were already there.
Even without the binoculars, on the wings of both planes Indy could clearly see the hinamaru—the rising red sun of the Japanese empire.
"Dr. Jones," Snark said. "You seem to be more trouble than you're worth. Somebody must have figured out which ship was unlucky enough to have you. Is there anyone back home who would pay good money to have you back safe and sound?"
"Not unless my old friend Marcus Brody can figure a way to make a museum piece out of me," Indy said.
"Too bad," Snark said. "These biplanes, they are too far out to sea now to turn back to Manchuria. They cannot land on the water, and they have barely enough fuel to reach the Japanese coast. Instead of a fuel pod, each carries a torpedo slung beneath her belly."
Snark handed the binoculars to Indy.
"Can you hail them?" Faye asked. "Negotiate, perhaps?"
"There's no radio on the Divine Wind," Snark said.
"I thought that after 1912—," Faye began.
"That's your world," Snark said impatiently. "The Titanic did not make a great deal of difference to us. In our world, shipwrecks are fate. For communication, we use signal guns, or flags, or rescue flares, instead of wireless. Unfortunately, that does not allow for two-way communication in this circumstance."
"I think they're about ready to send us a message," Indy said as through the binoculars he watched the biplanes line up on the stern of the Divine Wind for their attack. At seventy-five yards, the torpedo fell from the belly of the forward plane.
The mechanical shark left a stream of bubbles as it raced through the green water toward them. Snark turned the ship hard to port, then bellowed orders down the voice tube to evacuate the engine room and close the aft compartments.
"They're trying to sink us," Faye blurted.
"No," Snark said. "But they might manage to. They want to cripple us, to damage the old girl's rudder and screws and prevent us from escaping. If they had wanted to sink us, they would have hit us amidships with both torpedoes. But they don't know what we're carrying in the aft hold.
"Brace for impactSnark commanded.
Then he closed his eyes.
The torpedo struck slightly off-center, with a dampened whomp! that washed the stern with foam and sent a sickening shudder down the ship's keel.
Snark opened his left eye.
"Well, that wasn't so bad," Faye said after a moment.
"It's not over," Snark said as he tried the wheel. It was locked hard to port. "We have revolutions on one screw, but all we can do now is sail in a circle."
"What exactly are we carrying?" Indy asked.
"Chinese fireworks," Snark said.
"Fireworks?" Indy shot back. "And you call yourself a smuggler?"
"They're illegal," Snark said defensively. "And you know you could lose a finger with some of those things."
Black smoke belched from the stern.
The first mate spun the crank on an ancient mechanical siren to sound fire stations, and the half dozen crewmen who were still below emerged on deck. One of them was struggling with a Browning Automatic Rifle.
"Give me that," Snark said, taking the BAR away. "Do you want to start a war with the entire Imperial Army?"
A grease-stained mechanic burst onto the bridge.
"Anybody hurt?" Snark asked.
"No, Captain," he answered in Japanese.
"Then get down there and douse that fire," he barked.
"We can't, sir," the mechanic said. "The engine room is flooding, and the fuel oil is burning on top of the water."
"Is the aft hold secure?"
"Yes, sir," the mechanic said. "I think."
The shriek of a skyrocket and the machine-gun rattle of firecrackers ended his indecision.
"No, sir, apparently not."
"Damn," Snark said.
The Ki-10 that had released the torpedo had swung around to inspect the damage and was now flying low and slow over the Divine Wind—which was, at that moment, exactly the wrong place in the sky to be. A crate of fireworks exploded, engulfing the stern in a fiery blossom of red and green and peppering the wings of the Ki-10 with hundreds of flaming, buckshot-sized pellets. The bottom wing smoldered angrily for a few moments, then burst into flame.
"He's going to have to ditch," Indy said.
Snark cursed elaborately in Japanese.
"We've shot down one of the emperor's planes," he muttered to Indy in English. "With smuggled Chinese fireworks, while harboring a trio of Western fugitives."
"Congratulations," Indy said. "You're moving up in the world."
The pilot of the Ki-10 deftly guided the crippled plane toward the sea. It touched the surface two hundred yards off the starboard bow of the sinking cargo ship, tipping up on its nose in a great spray of water, then settling heavily back down.
Snark calmly gave the first mate the order to abandon ship.
"How much time do we have?" Indy asked.
"Twenty minutes," Snark said. "Half an hour, at most. The water won't douse the fireworks—they are chemically fueled, and they will burn a hole through t
he bottom of our hull. Then, we'll have flooded four compartments, which is one too many for us to stay afloat."
"How about going after that pilot?" Indy asked.
"He'll drown soon enough," Snark said, then smiled. "Funny, but this old girl had the last laugh, didn't she?"
"No, I mean to rescue."
"Not a bad idea," Snark said. He nodded toward the biplane still in the air. "Make a show of it, maybe save my neck if I ever get back home to Nagasaki. Mr. Bryce, take one of the boats and fish the emperor's chosen out of the sea."
"I'll go with you," Indy said.
"Be quick about it," Snark said. "It looks like the crew have claimed the other two boats. The rest of you, go as well. As captain, it's fitting that I am last off."
"Faye, get your things," Indy said.
Faye nodded. Mystery started to follow her to the cabin, but Faye pushed her back. "Help them launch the boat," she said.
"Just get the picture," Mystery said. "And my bag of tricks."
"Don't let Snark fool you," Bryce told Indy as they released the lifeboat from its blocks. "There isn't a bit of honor about him—he just wants to make sure he cleans out the safe in his cabin before the first mate beats him to it."
"Does he have that much to lose?" Mystery asked.
"It's not much," Bryce said. "At least not by our standards. A few hundred bucks, the price of a new car in the States. But with the ship gone, it's all he's got."
They threw a net over the side and, when Faye returned to the rail, they clambered down it into the sixteen-foot boat. Indy was gasping from the pain in his shoulder by the time they had the oars in the water.
"Let me," Mystery said and took Indy's place at the oar. "Go to the bow; search for the pilot."
"We're lucky," Bryce said. "The sea is calm this morning."
Then they all flinched as another round of pyrotechnics erupted from the hold and shrieked up into the early morning sky.
"Luck," Indy said, "is a relative term."
They rowed toward the oil slick that marked the spot where the plane had gone down. The pilot was resolutely treading water, keeping her mouth just above water.
Indy laughed when he saw the silky mass of dark hair floating around her head.
"Lieutenant Musashi," Indy said. "Why am I not surprised?"