Ghosts of Bungo Suido (29 page)

That lasted for five minutes, and then the door opened to reveal a middle-aged man in a civilian suit. He was carrying a metal folding chair. He was maybe five-six and had dark hair with graying temples and the face of a parish priest: a kind, calm, welcoming expression, and a look in his eyes that said,
Relax, nobody’s going to hurt you, we’re all going to be friends.
The two child-guards outside looked on with interest and bowed deeply as the older man stepped in and set up his chair. Then the new arrival produced a small black semiautomatic pistol. He checked to see that there was brass showing at the slide and then pressed it into Gar’s forehead.

“Quickly, now,” he said. “Name, rank, and serial number.”

Gar made the required recitation.

“Commander,” he said. “Did you say commander?”

“I did.”

He withdrew the pistol. “Commander of what?”

“That is my rank. Commander, U.S. Navy.”

“Commander of what ship?”

Gar recited his rank and serial number.

The Priest, as Gar visualized him, stared at Gar for a long moment. His expression never changed. A sweet man, a kind man. Never hurt a flea.

“Commander of what ship, please?” His English was unaccented. Not
prease,
please.

Gar again recited his name, rank, and serial number, trying to maintain the pretense that the Japanese respected the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs, the one they’d never signed.

Gar’s interrogator put the gun back into his jacket pocket and turned his head slightly. He nodded to one of the guards, who opened the cell door wide. Outside in the hallway an extremely gaunt and sick-looking Caucasian was kneeling on the concrete floor. His clothes were in tatters, and his eyes were swollen closed. Another, much older guard stood behind him with his own hands behind his back. The Priest said one word in Japanese, and the guard produced a pistol and shot the prisoner in the back of the head. He dropped to the floor without a sound and began to bleed copiously onto the concrete floor. The guard made a sound of disgust and shot him again. The two kids in uniform looked nauseated.

Nobody moved. A ribbon of blood had reached the drain in the floor outside and began to trickle audibly down into it. That was the only sound. The air stank of gunpowder.

“Commander of what ship, please?” Same placid expression. I’ve got all night and the world’s supply of prisoners.

Gar heard the sounds of a metal door opening and someone else being dragged into the corridor outside his cell. Guards muttering in Japanese, grunting and pulling, and a third voice whimpering, “No, no, please,” in English. A third guard dragged the dead prisoner out of Gar’s sight, and a new one was forced to kneel in the mess on the floor. The guard with the pistol looked over at the Priest, waiting for the sign. The interrogator sat back, lit a cigarette, spit out a fleck of wet tobacco, and gave Gar a moment to consider his circumstances. So he did.

He was a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army, who, these days anyway, were the absolute masters of the ancient kingdom of Dai Nippon. The Japanese were a race of men who were the masters of the delicately intricate tea ceremony, the precision and discipline of Zen rock and sand gardens, single-stroke calligraphy, and the arrangement of fresh cherry blossoms. They lived in wooden houses with parchment windows, and they slept on flat mats with no heat in the winter. These same men were also the masters of the exquisite samurai sword and the perpetrators of the rape of Nanjing in 1937, where they used live Chinese civilians for recruit bayonet practice. They were the architects of the hell ship system, transporting POWs captured in Southeast Asia in the holds of merchant ships with the hatches bolted shut for the entire two-week journey to the copper mines of Honshu. If the ship happened to be torpedoed along the way, the Japs went into the lifeboats and listened as the POWs tried in vain to open the hatches before the ship finally sank.

They were an alien race, so alien that Americans couldn’t even
begin
to appreciate how different the Japanese were in every respect. Death was supposed to mean nothing to them and everything to them. For any soldier, death in battle was the sublime objective. Death in captivity was the greatest dishonor they could imagine. Prisoners of war were therefore walking bags of offensive protoplasm, nothing more. POWs forfeited their humanity and all respect when they first raised their hands. Gar knew this Kempeitai officer would pull prisoners out of their cells and shoot every damned one of them until Gar decided to answer his question, and he’d do it without as much thought as he’d put into flicking that piece of wet tobacco off his lips.

Okay, he thought, I get the picture.

The only important thing that he knew and they apparently didn’t was the immutable certainty that Japan was going to lose this war. There were forces assembling 8,000 miles away that were going to purge the earth of this bizarre race. There were half a
million
troops being trained for one mission and one mission only: to invade this tiny island country and kill every goddamned Japanese man, woman, and child who stood up in front of them without waving a white flag, which really meant they were going to have to kill them all.

He decided at that moment to answer any and all of this man’s questions, because nothing that he learned from Gar would change what was coming.

“I was the commanding officer of the USS
Dragonfish,
an American submarine,” he said.

The interrogator nodded pleasantly. Then he swung around in his chair and signaled for the guards to take the second prisoner away. Or so Gar thought. They grabbed the prisoner and pushed him down the corridor. As Gar sat back in his chair, relieved that he hadn’t caused the death of another prisoner, two shots rang out, followed by laughter and shouts of fake annoyance at another mess in the hallway.

The interrogator looked at him as if to note his reaction, that infuriating smile still on his face. “Tomorrow,” he said. “We will talk some more tomorrow. No.
You
will talk some more tomorrow.”

He rose, folded up his chair, and left the cell. The two young guards, still looking unsettled at the murder of the two prisoners, were being handed wet mops as Gar’s cell door was slammed shut.

*   *   *

The next morning they brought Gar a metal pitcher of water, a tin cup of tea, and some rice cakes. He was stiff and achy after a cold night curled up in a corner on the concrete floor. His shins had big red goose eggs on them, and he was very careful not to let anything touch them.

It wasn’t much of a cell. A hole in the floor in the opposite corner served as the latrine. There was a single, foot-square window high up on the wall, which appeared to be open to the outside air. Twice during the night he’d heard locomotives huffing by the building, followed by the rattle of boxcars and squealing wheels. He’d also heard metal doors being opened and slammed shut throughout the night and wondered if this was some kind of transit station for POWs.

When the food came, one guard pointed a bayonet at him while the other deposited the pitcher, the tin cup, and the tiny wooden box on the chair. Then they withdrew, slamming the door as if trying to break it. Gar used a little bit of the water to wash his hands and face and then ate the food quickly, standing by the chair. He tried to warm his hands with the cup of tea before drinking some. It was very weak, and there were tiny stem fragments in the bottom. When he’d finished, he put the cup in the food box and put the box by the door. Then he sat down in the chair, facing the metal door, and waited. He stank of fish, mud, and general filth; in a land where they would have preferred to bathe hourly, he must have been a towering olfactory disturbance.

He awoke to the sound of keys in the door. He’d fallen back asleep without even realizing it. The door opened, and two different guards stepped in. These were not high school kids, Gar thought. These guys looked like battle-hardened infantry troops. They were not even armed. They motioned for him to stand up, and he did so, swaying a little on his badly bruised shins. One of them dropped a noose of rope around his neck, tightened it, and led him out of the cell. The other followed, leaving the cell door open. They went to the right, away from the scene of the butchery the evening before. At the end of the corridor they went outside into bright, gray light. They were walking across what looked like an army parade ground, surrounded by brick buildings of different sizes. Some were obviously barracks, the others offices or warehouses. A rail line ran behind the row of buildings on the end, not more than 100 yards from his cell house.

They walked across the parade ground, one guard in front, one behind, and Gar in the middle with his neck rope. He had the sense that if he had tripped and fallen, the guard in the lead would not have noticed. They went into one of the office buildings and up a flight of wooden stairs. So far, Gar had seen no one other than his two guards. The parade ground was deserted, and many of the buildings also looked empty. They took him to a room that held a long green-felt-covered table surrounded by several armchairs, with Japanese national and regimental flags mounted in one corner. Three water pitchers with glasses had been placed in front of the chairs on one side of the table. The guards nodded at one of the chairs on the opposite side of the table, and Gar sat down. The guard did not remove the noose. He dropped the other end of the rope on the floor, and then the two of them stepped behind him and went to parade rest. One of them made a quiet noise of disgust as he caught Gar’s aroma; the other grunted agreement, and then they each took one step back. Gar tried to act unconcerned and closed his eyes. He had high hopes for a civilized interrogation; this didn’t look like a place where they shot people on the carpet. On the other hand, he was sitting there with a hangman’s noose around his neck.

He was just about to doze off again when a door behind him opened and he heard low voices. He’d learned by then not to look around or do anything without being told, so he just sat there. Two Japanese officers in greenish uniforms came in and went around to the other side of the table. Each carried a notebook and wore a holstered pistol. Accompanying them was his interrogator from the night before, dressed in an army uniform and still smiling as if he hadn’t murdered any prisoners in at least, oh, eight hours. The naval officers sat down, and the one he’d been mentally calling the Priest cleared his throat and then rattled away in Japanese for a few minutes. Gar couldn’t tell if he was in charge or just a briefer here. One of the naval officers looked to be much older and carried himself with the gravitas of a senior officer. The other one was paying close attention to the Priest, while the older one seemed a bit disinterested. Then Gar realized that the Priest was speaking to him.

“Tell us how you came to be here today,” he instructed. Gar proceeded to do so, while the Priest did a simultaneous translation into Japanese. He told them about ordering the boat to dive without him, then being captured by the minesweepers and taken to Kure and eventually the
Shinano
. When he said the word
Shinano
the older officer came awake. He asked a question in a voice that sounded like he regularly gargled with sandpaper.

“He wants to know how
you
can know that name,” the Priest said. “That name is a great secret.”

“It was our mission to penetrate the minefields of Bungo Suido and sink that ship,” Gar said. “Instead we had to attack her in dry dock. Later, after I was captured, I was aboard
Shinano
when she was torpedoed and sunk.”

The Priest blinked and then gave him a long stare. The Captain, which is what Gar had decided to call the obviously senior officer, barked something.

“Think carefully,” the Priest said. “No one here at this compound knows anything about a sinking. For your information, that is the official government line.”

“You mean,
Shinano
wasn’t sunk?”

“That ship was attacked at sea but shrugged off all attacks and has gone on to Yokosuka. Everyone knows that.”

“What do you want me to say, then?” Gar asked. “Just so
you
know, I was the one who fired torpedoes at two destroyers, two ammunition barges, and then the dry-dock caisson wall at Kure. Once I was captured in the Hoyo Strait, a Kempeitai officer took me aboard the carrier for transport to Tokyo. The captain of the ship, Captain Abe, made me stand on the bridge so that I could see for myself that she was invulnerable. I was on the bridge when the four torpedoes hit, and an hour or so later I watched her sink, stern first, and take probably more than two thousand men with her.”

The Priest hissed in annoyance and then spoke to the Captain, who had picked up on the name Abe. When the Priest was finished translating, the Captain spat out something that sounded to Gar a lot like the Japanese equivalent to “bullshit.” The other naval officer looked very apprehensive, as if he shouldn’t be hearing any of this. Then the Captain surprised him and spoke in English.

“Name of Kempeitai officer?”

“Yamashita,” Gar said.

The Captain grunted and then said something in Japanese to the Priest, who hesitated and then replied. Whatever he said made the Captain look truly surprised.

“Why do you agree to talk to us?” the Captain asked.

“Because whatever you learn from me does not matter.”

The Captain thought that one over. “Tell me something important. Something I do not know.”

“Our submarines can penetrate your minefields because we can see the mines,” Gar said.

“That is lie,” the Captain scoffed.

“We came through Bungo Suido. Is it not mined?”

“You had chart. Someone betrayed us.”

“Didn’t need a chart,” Gar said. “We can
see
the mines.”

“How is this possible?”

“Sonar,” Gar said.

“More stupid lies.”

“Did a submarine fire torpedoes into the caisson where
Shinano
was berthed? Sink two destroyers? Explode the ammunition barges?”