Ghosts of Bungo Suido (26 page)

“He wants to know if you see what is happening. After four torpedo hits,
Shinano
presses on. She has shrugged off your submarine’s best efforts as the bites of a flea!”

More along that line followed, which quieted the pilothouse as the other officers listened in. When he was finished, Abe looked at him as if expecting some kind of reply. That’s when the ceramic mug sitting on the window ledge by his chair began to move. It slid slowly to the right, all by itself, making a thin scraping noise. Every eye on the bridge focused on that mug as it traveled across the ledge and came to a stop with a tiny clink against a window frame. None of them had noticed, but
Shinano
was developing a distinct list to starboard. One of the junior officers made a sharp bow toward the captain, then pointed at the centerline, where an inclinometer was mounted in the overhead above the pelorus. It showed a 5-degree list to starboard. Only two minutes after being torpedoed, she was listing.

The major took this opportunity to yell at Gar in Japanese, slap him in the face, and then drag him back out to the port-side bridge wing, as the noise level roared back up inside. Gar was surprised but offered no resistance; he realized Yamashita was getting Gar, and himself, out of Captain Abe’s line of fire—but why, he wondered. Once outside, the major started rubbing the sides of his own face, exhibiting the first signs of genuine fear. Gar gave him a nod of thanks, and Yamashita nodded back.

“It can’t be that bad,” Gar said. “The ship is still going forward at the same speed. If she were in real danger, they would slow down.”

Even as he said that, he noticed that his perch on the binocular box now required the use of his lower legs. It occurred to him that their blind faith in the unsinkability of this carrier might be leading them toward an avoidable disaster. With the ship still going ahead at 18 knots, there would be tremendous hydraulic pressure on the hull ruptures, and Gar knew probably better than anyone on the bridge about the state of below-deck watertight integrity.

“Do we have to stay here?” Gar asked the major.

“We have not been dismissed,” he replied in a shaking voice.

“Don’t you think they’re a little busy in there right now? I think we should go down to the flight deck, where all those people are.”

Yamashita looked over the port bullrail as if surprised to see several hundred men down on the flight deck, most of them milling around in growing disorder. Some of them appeared to be looking through the stacked pallets of materials. Many were wearing hard hats, which told him they were civilian shipyard workers, but there were more than a few ship’s company out there on deck as well.

“We must have permission,” the major said. “It was the captain who demanded you be brought to the bridge.”

At that moment there was a deep rumbling sound forward of the island, and the bitch-box inside lit off with a panicked call. A roar of steam came out of the forward stack. From Gar’s days as a new ensign on a battleship, he knew that volume of steam meant someone had deliberately lifted the safety valves on a boiler. That meant flooding had reached a main machinery space. A moment later, the volume of steam increased. Gar looked back at the major, who was clearly terrified of what he was seeing. He saw Gar looking at him.

“I cannot swim,” he said. Gar couldn’t hear him over the roar of the escaping steam, so he said it again.

Now Gar knew why the major was so scared and, more importantly, why he’d bullied Gar out of the pilothouse. The initiative had passed to him, the prisoner.

“Not a problem,” he said, shouting over the roar of the steam. “I can swim. We need to find the life jacket lockers. There’ll be some on the flight deck, and probably more down on the hangar deck. Come on, let’s go look.”

Yamashita took one more look at the panicked scene inside the pilothouse and said, “Yes, we go.”

They took the exterior ladders down the port side of the island structure. As they went down they saw one of the destroyers closing in on the port side from astern. The flight deck crowd was growing, and so was the starboard list. Gar had to keep one hand on the bulkhead as they scrambled down the ladders. There were no lights showing anywhere on the flight deck, and the civilians were clearly panicked. Gar saw no one wearing a life jacket. Surely they hadn’t gone to sea with no life jackets, he thought. The thunder of escaping steam was beginning to diminish as the boilers bled out five decks below. They were still making way, however, so she had propulsion power available.

When they reached the flight deck, Gar told the major to go find life jackets. He sat down against the island bulkhead, next to a row of pallets filled with tubing and valves. No one seemed to notice him. The white padded jacket helped, and he kept his head down. Then he remembered the prisoners clipped to that wire down on the fantail. He could find his way back there, he thought, and cut them loose somehow, but only if the goons had abandoned them. The major returned empty-handed and more than a little white-eyed. He had to catch himself against the bulkhead to stop his forward motion.

“No one knows where the life jackets are, and there are no boats or rafts.
Goddamn
navy.”

Gar almost grinned but caught himself. There were hundreds of pallets stacked all over the flight deck; if nothing else they could upend one and use it as a float when the time came, and he was getting more and more convinced that the time
was
coming. There was a sudden outbreak of yelling as one of the electric trucks they used to move stuff around the flight deck went rolling straight over the starboard side, pausing momentarily in a catwalk before upending and disappearing into the sea. Two sailors trying to catch and stop it went over the side with it. The list was becoming steep enough that some of the pallets themselves were starting to slide.

The escaping-steam noise stopped suddenly as if someone had put a stopper in the escape piping. Perhaps the sea had done that, Gar thought. The ship felt different now, heavier, and the period of her normally ponderous sea roll was increasing. That, together with the fact that she was hanging for a moment at the end of each roll, meant that her stability was being rapidly compromised. She was no longer plunging ahead at 18 knots, either. Gar grabbed the major’s arm.

“The prisoners down on the fantail,” he said. “They are clipped to a wire. I want to go back there and save them.”

Yamashita was beside himself with indecision. His entire world depended on permission, tradition, or actual orders. All of these things were disappearing before his eyes, and this giant ship was leaning over to take a look down into the 3,000 feet of water beckoning beneath her keel.

“You’re an officer,” Gar said. “If you order the guards to release the prisoners, they will do it. Then we can make preparations for going into the water. But we must hurry.”

“You can swim?”

“Yes, I can swim. I will help you, but it would be better to go from the stern than from way up here, yes?”

One of the loaded pallets positioned between them and the rest of the flight deck made a noise and then started sliding toward them. They had to move fast to avoid being pinned against the bulkhead. Other pallets followed their leader. Gar took the lead once they were moving aft, easing his way through the increasingly noisy crowd of frightened shipyard workers on the flight deck. There were some chief petty officers out on the deck now, trying to restore order. They were quickly surrounded by a throng of shouting workers, probably wanting to know where the life jackets were.

They continued aft, away from the increasingly agitated crowd swarming out of the ship and onto the flight deck. The list had stabilized for the moment, but they were still over between 10 and 15 degrees. Gar could feel what was happening, and with that thick armored flight deck,
Shinano
was already top-heavy. Add to that the tons of stacked pallets and a thousand or so human beings, and the damage control officer had his hands full. Gar found a wool watch cap on the deck, which he pulled down over his head. With that and the padded jacket he was less obviously one of the POWs.

He didn’t know how to get back to the fantail except by going down to the hangar bay. The major balked at that, especially since they were on the downhill side. Going down
into
the ship was not his idea of safety just then. Gar explained that he needed him to deal with the guards, and that
he
needed Gar to keep him afloat. They would go down, get those guys freed, and then come back up to the flight deck if Yamashita insisted. The major sputtered about it not being allowed, but then relented as Gar started down an interior passageway ladder on the starboard side. When they came out onto the hangar bay, Gar smelled something that gave him the chills: bilge water. He knew it as a unique smell, a mélange of saltwater, fuel oil, dead marine life, rust, and oil-soaked pipe lagging, all overlaid with a warm, humid blanket of condensed steam. It meant only one thing: The main engineering spaces were flooding.

They made their way aft some 400 feet along one side of the hangar bay. They saw at least three damage control parties furiously working gasoline-powered pumps and another one operating a bucket brigade. For God’s sake, Gar thought. A bucket brigade for a 70,000-ton ship. The dozens of lights embedded along the overhead of the hangar bay were flickering, and Gar could hear the roar of diesel generators in the emergency service rooms on the margins of the bay. The list seemed less extreme down there, closer to the waterline, which made sense. They were probably counterflooding, much the way a sub trimmed its attitude underwater. There was a wet mist visibly gathering along the hangar bay’s overhead, though, which Gar hoped to God wasn’t gasoline vapor.

The final passageway was blocked by overturned pallets of supplies, so they ended up clambering over the mess to get out to the fantail. It was much darker back here, and Gar saw buckled deck plates on the starboard quarter. Two of the diagonal braces for the flight deck had been bent by the blast of the first torpedo. The vibration from the screws was much more pronounced than before, especially the ones on the port side. He wondered if their tips were coming out of the water because of the list. Why the hell hadn’t they stopped the ship? From the size of the wake, it looked like they were still making 10 knots or so.

The good news was that the goons had fled. The bad news was that all the POWs were still attached to that wire, and Gar saw no way to cut it or the lock that attached it to a padeye on the bulkhead. The black water of the Pacific Ocean looked awfully close as he stared at the damage to the starboard quarter of the ship. Then he jumped as a dark gray shape came out of the gloom, passing very close aboard. It was one of the destroyers, and half her crew was topside, holding ropes and nets, obviously bent on taking people off the carrier. The major saw that, and for a moment Gar thought he was going to jump for it, but then the tin can disappeared around the corner of the fantail.

Then one of the POWs recognized Gar and gestured excitedly, pointing at a firefighting ax mounted to one of the flight-deck support beams. He climbed up the sloping, buckled deck and took it down. As he headed for the end of the wire, one of the goons stepped out on the fantail and started yelling at him, brandishing his baton indignantly. The major went at the man in his best imperial army voice, bracing him up against the front bulkhead and shouting the harshest Japanese Gar had ever heard. Gar went behind the major and got to the padeye, stuck the pick end of the ax into the hasp, positioned the ax head for leverage, and pulled with all his much-diminished strength. He did it four times before he felt something happening, cheered on the whole time by the trapped POWs. Then he heard what sounded like a warning shout and instinctively ducked as the goon’s baton whistled over his head and smacked the bulkhead.

Gar didn’t hesitate—he thrust backward with the ax handle and connected with the guard’s groin. He went down with a gasping whimper, curling up into a writhing ball of pain. Before Gar could do anything else, the major calmly came up behind the disabled guard and hit him on the head with a chain stanchion he’d found somewhere. The guard’s eyes rolled up into his head and he lay still.

Gar took the ax back to the padlock and finally broke it apart. The wire went whipping out of that padeye at the speed of heat as the POWs all tried to stand up at once. Then the whole line fell down in a heap due to the list of the ship. While they sorted themselves out, he and the major looked at each other and then dragged the inert body of the guard over to the starboard lifeline and pushed it over the side. It should have taken a few seconds for the splash, but it didn’t. It had been at least 25 feet to the waterline on the night they left Kure. Now it was more like 10 feet. That fact even registered with the major, who made one of those hissing sounds as he stared over the side. The starboard-side screws weren’t turning anymore. A passing swell broke green water over the edge of the buckled deck, as if to make it clear that time was fleeting.

The POWs didn’t wait to thank them or even talk to them. They headed en masse for that passageway and disappeared into the gloom.

Gloom?

The lights had gone out in the hangar bay, except for some emergency battery lanterns mounted along the bulkheads. The POWs were all assholes and elbows disappearing over the clutter in the passageway. The major’s eyes were almost as round as Gar’s as the significance of what he’d done sunk in. He was, after all, a military policeman. Gar grabbed his elbow and told him it would be okay, that he would never say anything, and those POWs certainly wouldn’t, either. Now he had to get him back topside before he completely lost it—but then Gar realized they’d waited too long.

TWENTY-TWO

A rumbling sound began deep in the hull. Gar immediately recognized it, having heard it before as a submarine skipper: the sound of collapsing bulkheads deep in the ship, the bang of huge sheets of steel giving way under the relentless pressure of the ocean, the pinging of rivets blasting around inside compartments. The two remaining screws on the port side slowed to a stop. There was a loud bang, followed by a horrific rending sound, and then they could feel the stern sag down into the sea. She was listing to starboard and settling by the stern at the same time. Gar slid across the wet deck to the lifelines and saw that the water was only a few feet down, if that. The major just stood at the entrance to the passageway, transfixed.