by Dean Ing
Chip used his Maglite to enter the same hole, afraid to do it, yet buoyed by the soft scuffings of sandals just ahead. And hey, anything Keikano could do,... He found himself following down steps chiseled into soft limestone. A few steps ahead and below, Keikano's flashlight made a moving ellipse of light that splashed against a wall of naked gray bedrock on the right. Chip kept his shoulder brushing that wall because to his left was only the edge of those hewn steps and, beyond, pure velvet blackness.
After they had descended perhaps thirty steps, Keikano stopped, redirected his flash beam outward and down, then twisted the device for a tighter focus. Ten yards below them, shining in the light-but softly, softly-a metal wingtip stood out in stark relief. Under Keikano's control the beam crawled farther away, outlining the entire wing, then the fuselage Of a single-place aircraft, its canopy intact, its tail surfaces apparently undamaged. On the fuselage, a circle of red a yard wide proclaimed the rising sun of a Japanese fighter plane generations old, and Chip Mason was briefly awash with goose-pimples.
"Will this make them forget minerals?"
"What minerals," Chip had asked, their mutual laughter echoing softly in the cave.
They went no farther down the steps than that, Chip admitted to the silent crew. "There were two or three more like that fighter-radial engines, Zeroes I think, and a big twin engine job that may have been green or black. It was hard to tell in that light. Maybe five planes, all told," he added. "I asked if Pclelc's gang knew about it. Keikano said no, and if they ever found out he had known, they'd hunt him down like a goat."
"Oh Jesus, ohh, Jesus," Myles crooned, hugging himself, rocking to and fro. "Kid, if you're putting us on-"
"The little dogs body. He knew all the time," said Reventlo, accepting Chip's account for the moment at face value.
"Oh yeah, but I don't think he realizes it's why we came," Chip said. "I think we should keep it that way. For Keikano's sake, this has got to be something we found without help."
Lovett rubbed his temples with fingertips, nodding to himself. "Of course. Walled up at the end of the runway; easy access, no long tow job. I should've figured this.. Olmy, okay, they're in a cavern. How the hell did they get in there?"
"Screw that," Myles retorted. "How do we get 'em out?"
Lovett said, as if to a small boy, "It's the same question, Vic. You know damn well they didn't assemble the planes in there, so there's got to be a larger entrance."
"If there's not, I'll make one," Myles promised gruffly. "If my TNT
bricks aren't enough, Cris can bring us some plain ol' sixty-percent dynamite."
Mel Benteen had been listening quietly, studying the men as she might study zoo specimens. Now she said, "Are you insane, Myles? I'm no expert, but-set off high explosives in a cavern? I've heard you can make them collapse with a loud yell."
"Excuse me," from Chip, "but from what I saw, it didn't look like a regular cavern; no stalactites hanging down or anything. No bats that I saw. The light was pitiful but it just looked like they'd carved it out of limestone."
"That'd take a long time," Coop objected. "Something weird about all this."
"It's probably academic," Reventlo said. "They had to have a safe way of bringing the planes out. We'll simply have to find it."
Gunther shook his head dolefully. "Wish I was as sure as you are, Cris.
Who's to say what orders those crazy fuggers were following?"
The Brit sighed. "Coop, they all had one motive: protecting the home islands. The Nips began to collect everything that would fly in the spring and summer of '45 for the suicide armada they intended to fling at us. For years after the war, Japanese aircraft were turning up in underground hangars as far away as Taiwan. One Zeke was found in decent shape on Guam back in the early sixties-not all that far from here and restored. And there's that story about Atsugi."
Lovett: "The old base near Tokyo?"
Reventlo nodded. "Back in '68, 1 think. They say a bulldozer was crossing a taxiway when the concrete collapsed into a sinkhole, bulldozer and all. There were several fighter planes down there, nicely preserved. Not many people know about it, but that's why I was primed to believe old Elmo's story from Day One."
"So how'd they get 'em out," Myles asked. 'I wish to God I knew," the Brit replied.
When the schoolteacher failed to show up the next morning, no one was in a mood to wait for him. The existing road near the south beach brought the entire crew, chugging along on three Cushmans, almost to the airstrip. Their rope and battery powered spotlights fitted, just barely, beneath the passenger seats and they carried a pair of shovels as window dressing. Lovett had expected Coop Gunther to decline the trip but,
"Miss. the unveiling? I'll crawl if I have to," the old fellow had said.
Chip located the faint upward path he had descended more or less blindly the night before, a goat track virtually hidden by lush undergrowth. The moment Myles unlimbered his machete, Lovett put up a restraining hand.
"Hey, let's not build a freeway, or sing any god damned marching songs.
The quieter we keep this, the better."
"I wish that little fart, Keikano, was here," Coop muttered, using his shovel as a walking stick.
"I can get us there," Chip said.
"It's not that," said the old fellow, with a sad little smile. "I just need somebody to beat the shit out of, every time my leg twinges; and you guys are all bigger than I am."
"Thanks a load," said Benteen, who was the smallest of them all. Her sffiile reassured Coop. Lovett had never seen her in such good spirits.
For Mel, he saw, this meant more than money and adventure: nothing less than the final validation of old Elmo Benteen.
In some places the climb was steep and Lovett, peering closely at the stone underfoot, noticed the subtle rounding and polishing of projections suggesting that, at some time or other, this soft limestone had known many a footstep. They moved around a low ridge, still rising, then returned moments later so that the airstrip came in view again. It was clearly visible from here as a line of least vegetation growing toward the beach and the breakers beyond.
Then Chip Mason stood at the top of that sheer drop-off, arms akimbo, frowning at the vine-covered rampart he faced. And for one long, goose-pimpled moment, Lovett wondered if this were all some elaborate hoax by his grandson. I'll boot his ass over this five-story bluff, he swore silently. I will!
But after a moment of intent scrutiny of the stone embankment, Chip fitted his fingers into a seam; hauled sideways at the apparently immovable rock. An oval slab, no more than two inches thick, rolled away under its thin camouflage of live creeper vines, and the youth turned back to them, grinning. "Miz Benteen, it seems only right for you to go first."
Mel Benteen waved her hands before her as if polishing a rmffor. "No, no, caves aren't my strong point, Chip. I'll follow YOU."
"Hey, listen now," Myles said, shuffling forward quickly. "Let me do it, okay? I've got an editor to impress." He unlimbered his little camera, took a shot.
Reventlo got there first, pausing at the entrance. "Not a good enough reason, Victor."
"Wait, wait! Okay then. A hundred bucks, Cris." Myles put his fight hand up to God.
"Still not good enough," the Brit said, implacable.
Myles ground his teeth. "Son of a-two hundred," he pleaded.
"Apiece," Reveiitlo said pleasantly. "Those were very expensive mosquito nets you sold us, Victor."
"All right, goddamniit, deal. Now get out of my way." And so saying, survivalist guru Victor Myles pocketed his camera, ducked into the hole, and missed the step, sprawling headfirst into the dim recess.
Chip caught the Texan by a trouserleg, warning him about the lack of handrails as Myles regained his feet cursing tunnels, steps, and folks who snickered at folks who fell down. Moments later they were crowding the inner wall in single file, flashlights washing the cave with errant beams. Now their progress was marked by echoes in oppressive blackness.
&n
bsp; Still in the lead, Myles paused halfway down and let his flash beam play over the booty spread below. "The kid's right, they're Zeroes," he boomed, as "zeroes, eroes, eroes," mocked him faintly.
Revendo stopped so suddenly that Benteen collided with him. "No, wait,"
he said. "Let's have all those torches together." They plied the beams over the nearest fighter, oohing and aahing, until Reventlo slumped against the wall. "My God," he said softly. "Oh, my very dear God."
"What's the matter?" Myles seemed ready to believe the worst while gazing at the best.
"Not Zeroes," said the Brit.
"Yeah," Lovett mused. "Canopy's different; tail cone, too. And something about the cowling.. I don't know, the later models-"
"Tojo," said Reventlo, almost in a whisper. "It's a sodding Nakajima Tojo. Tie me kangaroo down if that isn't a Shoki; Tojo, Ki-44, same thing."
Gunther had caught up with them now and said for them all, "That's bad?"
"That is not bad, not bad at all," Reventio crooned, and there are four of them in here, lads and lass." Now the proper Brit astonished them all with an impromptu dance step, then leaned back against the wall again with a long, low whistle. "The twin-engine there is an old friend, if I may call it that: a Mitsubishi G4M, alias a Betty bomber. But-four Tojos?
Out-bloody-standing!
"You're starting to piss me off," Lovett said.
"That's because you didn't do your homework," his friend rejoined.
"There are records of surviving Nip aircraft, Wade. A few Zeroes are still flying. Go on, ask the next question."
"You're saying the Tojo is rare," Benteen prodded.
"Not rare. You're at liberty to guess how many Tojos made it through the war." No one spoke. "Zed. Zip, and if you'll pardon the expression, zero. They were thought extinct. If these old beauties can be made to work as well as they look-well, it could be closer to two million apiece. You are looking at the only surviving M-44 Tojos on the surface of the globe."
"Under it, you mean," said Coop, at Myles's shoulder. "Why are we standing here when we could be-hey, just a froggin' minute here. Smell something?"
Just hangar smells. No ammonia, if that's what you mean," Myles said, then continued with due caution.
Coop began to descend again behind Myles. "Right. Fuel, lubricant, rubber. After fifty years?"
Until that moment, Lovett had taken the familiar odors for granted. Now his mind reeled, and gooseflesh toured his arms as he followed Coop down those steps. A long disused hangar had its own sad, unique stinks: the sweetish odor of old Plexiglas, sometimes' the dry tang of corroded aluminum. Rarely, the scent of old lubricant. But gasoline after fifty years? No way, his gooseflesh chanted in unison.
An instant's burst of blue-white light flooded the cave, setting Lovett's night vision back to square, one. "Victor, why are you blinding us at a time like this," Reventlo asked with a courtesy they all knew could be deceptive.
"Proof positive," said the Texan. "This little Polaroid is gonna bring me a best-seller."
"Kindly warn us from now on, there's a good chap," Reventlo pleaded. One by one, they reached an uneven stony floor that, Lovett found, was old coral filled in by cement Their discovery had become so enormous in Lovett's mind that, for the moment, he had to focus on something more easily grasped. So, as other flashbeams played over the hidden aircraft and more impatient fingers thumped aluminum hides, Wade Lovett walked in a squat, following his flash beam toward the juncture of floor and cave wall.
When'he had studied the tool marks on the floor as far as the juncture he moved his flash beam up, following a gentle curvature innocent of tool marks to the point where it became an overhang, then a natural ceiling that swept forward to meet a front wall lost in shadow. "Hell, this was ordinary wave action," he said aloud, gazing at the smoothly contoured roof. No one paid attention, Coop and Reventlo talking a mile a minute as they clambered onto wing roots and slid canopies back. Wade Lovett stood up and strode to the opposite wall, nearly braining himself against a wing trailing edge in the process.
He needed only a moment to discover that the front wall was -man-made; not limestone but cement, rising vertically from a foundation of debris to a height of perhaps thirty feet before it met the natural limestone rool "Oh boy," he muttered to his gooseflesh; the entire forward face of the cave stood poised, awaiting exactly the right jolt-one that any vagrant earth tremor might have provided during the past fifty years.
"I've found the other one," Chip yelled, his flash beam touring the underside of the lone twin-engined bomber. Lovett's hand lay against the cement wall, which vibrated at the youth's high-pitched shout. 'Stop, stop it, quiet," Lovett begged, but trying to shout without shouting was like trying to hammer a nail quietly. He hurried across the undulating floor surface and arrived at Chip's side as Myles dropped to his haunches beneath the bomber's belly, the better to see what Chip had found. "Please knock the noise off," Lovett begged as the others converged on the new find. "I've been checking this cave out, and believe me, it's not all that stable."
"Been here a long time," Myles countered. 'Not with a convention of Swiss yodelers bottled up inside, hooting their empty heads off," Lovett reminded him. "When my grandson yelled, I could feel the whole front wall shake. And I'll bet my share of this operation that it's about as thick as the film on your teeth. Yeah, we want it to come down-but maybe not while we're inside, okay? So let's hold it down to a dull roar unless we want a reeeal sharp one."
"It's that thin? Doesn't make sense," Reventlo said, sending his flash beam to the featureless front wall.
"It does," Lovett said, "if you're a Japanese detachment sealing up aircraft under a big limestone overhang. We're standing on old coral smoothed out with modern cement. That says, about the time of saber tooth tigers, the sea level was a bit higher here. Waves undercut the limestone cliff over the coral; then the sea level eventually dropped away, roughly when humans quit swinging through the trees. My guess is, the airstrip was built where it is precisely because there was an overhang of limestone ten feet thick and deep enough to provide a natural hangar. Then when they got orders to hide it, they only had to create one wall."
"So all they had to do was run up some reinforcing mesh and plaster it with cement," Reventlo mused.
"By mesh you mean re-bar? That's assuming they had any, Cris. We won't know 'til it comes down. But that's cement, all right, and I'll give you odds it was designed to come down in a hurry."
"Lemme tell ya," drawled Myles, "it sure would if that thing under the Betty ever goes off." And with this, he swung his beam under the bomber to show them something most military pilots knew, if only from its legends.
The wings of the staunch old Mitsubishi bomber spanned perhaps eighty feet, main landing gear extending down from its engine nacelles. A man could walk under the wing and could ordinarily have ducked beneath its belly. But not beneath this one; half-submerged in the bomb bay, as if grafted to the bomber, lay a long, spume green bomb. No, not just a bomb, for its fins were short straight wings, and it had miniature tail surfaces as well. What they saw was a tiny long nosed aircraft, its canopy almost hidden within the bomber, but it had neither propeller nor jet intake. "Who wants my share of this," Lovett muttered, because he knew what it was. And Chip was practically huddled against its long forward section. "Chip, get away from there."
"Wouldn't matter where he was if it decided to let go now," Myles chuckled.
I 'Ohka," said Reventlo with something like reverence. "And it's still linked up, ready to go."
Chip had moved back now, tapping at a stubby wing that was less than seven feet from the fuselage to wingtip. Its entire wingspan could not have been over 'seventeen feet. "The wings are wood, Pop."
"We've got a Baka bomb," Reventlo said. "That's what the Allies called it; a fool bomb, as if cursing it in Japanese would stop them from dropping it. Yes, the flight surfaces were wood. But the entire nose section was about a ton Of high explosive."
They studied it silently for a moment, its twin rudders flanking the bomber's fuselage, a pinkish five-petaled emblem painted against its pale green hide. "But it looks like a guided missile," Chip said at length.
"It was," said Lovett. "A glider with a difference; for its dash to the target it used internal rocket boosters. Subsonic, but faster than anything we had. But see that little canopy sticking up into the bomb bay? That's where the guidance system sat.
"Oh, jeez," Chip said softly, understanding half Of it. "You mean a guy sat in there and steered it until time to bail out.
"He sat there," Myles put in. "But he didn't bail out. He didn't have a chute, kid."
"The Nips called it the Ohka; cherry blossom," Reventlo said. "The idea was to train teenagers to guide them down against Allied warships. One Ohka, one ship. Ever see cherry blossoms dropping in a spring breeze?
Like a blizzard. That's the blizzard of Ohkas they intended to drop, taking a generation of their youngsters with it. Worked all too well, when they could get within twenty miles of a ship. I'm told the problem was, the Betty bomber there was too slow when carrying an Ohka like that. Our lads shot most of them down before they got within range."
"And no chute," Chip said, marveling. "That was some gnarly shit for their high-school kids."
"Nope, no chute. And no landing gear either, and engines cheap as skyrockets, 'cause that's what they were," Myles said, flopping down to throw a beam up the exhaust port of the little Ohka. Now his voice took on a softer echo, as though from within a stovepipe. "Well, folks, this
'un's ready for the Fourth of July. Three little JATOS packed in here.
Wait a minute," he went on, shoving his arm far into the aperture, grunting.
"Victor, I'm sure. we'd all appreciate it if-" Reventio began.
"Getcher fuckin' paws outa there," Coop snarled, to short circuit the Brit's languid rhetoric. "That's all we need, you setting off a booby trap in here with a rocket on one end and a one-ton bomb on the other."