Ghosts of Bungo Suido (30 page)

More sucking in of air all around. The Priest had to translate some of the words.

“You are spy,” the Captain concluded. “You have heard these things in one of the villages. In Kure, or Hiroshima City. None of this is true.”

Gar sat back in his chair. If the Captain was going to label him a spy, he was a dead man.

“Have you been to Kure recently?” Gar asked. “Make a phone call. Tell them you wish to come down there and inspect the waterfront. See what they say.”

The Priest had to translate again. The Captain glared at Gar for a moment, banged his palm down on the table, nodded, got up, and left the room. The other officer spoke up once the Captain was gone. He, too, had English.

“You must be much more careful,” he said. “Whether or not the things you say are true, they are not permitted to be
spoken,
do you understand? Listen to the major.”

Gar wasn’t having it. “I understand,” he said, “that the General Imperial Staff or whatever you call it is deluding itself.
Shinano
has
been destroyed. The Kure naval base waterfront
is
a mess. The submarine that was waiting for
Shinano was
one of many. If you intend to kill me because I speak the truth, then I can’t help that. But that won’t change the truth.”

The officer had no reply to that. Gar asked them how it was that they all were able to speak English. The Priest, whom he now knew was a major, smiled. “I am Kempeitai, foreign espionage division. These officers are naval intelligence. Of course we can speak English. Do all your naval intelligence officers not speak Japanese?”

The real answer to that was no—none that he had ever met, anyway. He shook his head.

“Then how can they ever catch Japanese spies?” he asked.

“They don’t try,” Gar said.

“Explain.”

“If we think someone is a Japanese spy, we leave him alone. We let him report on the
true
situation. That there are now so many American warships there is not room for them all to anchor in one harbor. That new ships arrive every week. That large American airfields are being built on Guam and Tinian. That two American armies have invaded the Philippines. That—”

“Enough!” the Priest said. “This is propaganda.”

At that moment a siren began wailing, and then a second one, more distant. The Priest made a face.

“B-29?” Gar asked.

The Priest shrugged, then nodded.

“This doesn’t happen in America,” Gar pointed out.

At that moment the Captain came back into the room and let fly with a torrent of rapid-fire Japanese. He seemed angrier with them than afraid of any impending air raid, if that’s what it was. More sirens were going off now, and Gar could hear people stirring out in the hallway. The two guards stepped back into the room. One came up and removed the noose.

The major stood up, his face no longer quite so genial.

“You go now. Go with them. Keep silent!”

Gar turned around and followed one guard out the door while the other one fell in behind him. They didn’t put the noose back on this time, and everyone seemed to be in just a bit of a hurry. They took him back outside and toward his cell house. What Gar had thought to be unoccupied office buildings were emptying out onto the parade field. It looked like the men were all falling into some kind of formation. He would have thought they’d be heading for bomb shelters, but it was apparent they had defiance on their minds. Gar listened for the rumble of a bomber formation but heard none, and there was nothing visible in that cold gray sky as they went into the cell house. They marched him right back into his cell, where the guard obligingly threw in the noose, in case Gar might yet change his mind and do the honorable thing. Then the door was slammed.

TWENTY-FIVE

After an hour or so the sirens went off again, sounding a steady tone for the all clear. Gar never did hear any airplanes. They brought some food and water toward evening, and a wet towel, which allowed him to wash off some of the accumulated filth. Sometime after that he heard a commotion out in the corridor. It sounded like all the cells were being opened up, and then his door opened and he was yanked out into a line of prisoners in the corridor. The man ahead of him was wearing a hood, and a short rope hung down to his waist from underneath it. One guard bound Gar’s hands loosely with manila line and indicated that Gar should grab that man’s rope. Then Gar’s own noose, followed by a hood, was pulled down over Gar’s head. A moment later, the man behind him took hold of his trailing rope. When the man ahead of him started walking, Gar followed suit to keep from choking him. Fortunately the man behind him also understood the game.

They were poked and prodded down the corridor and then outside, where rough hands kept them tripping down a set of stairs. Then more trudging, probably across that parade ground, until he heard the distinctive sounds of a steam locomotive idling somewhere ahead of them. They encountered a wooden ramp, where hands at the top guided them to the back walls of a boxcar and pushed them down into a seated position. Gar ended up in a corner, with another POW on his right. One of the guards shouted a series of commands, and then big doors rolled shut. Twenty minutes or so later, the steam engine started up with a jerk, and they were off, destination anybody’s guess.

“Who are you?” the man on his right asked. Gar told him. The other man said he was army air force, Major Jimmy Franklin, pilot of a B-29 recce bird that had been taken down over Kyushu. He had a mild southern accent.

“I thought you guys flew so high they couldn’t get at you,” Gar said.

“We thought so, too,” he said. “We were at thirty-five thousand feet, but they’ve got a new tactic. Guy gets in a fighter plane, on oxygen, we think, and flies out ahead and above us. They’ve done something to the engine, because at the last minute he inverts and then flies right into us. Took our left wing right off. Copilot and I got out; another fighter strafed him in his chute, missed me, and here I am, lucky fucking me. We’re going to Tokyo, apparently.”

“Why Tokyo?”

“We were briefed back at home base that senior officers are taken to Tokyo so the expert interrogators get a shot at them. You were a CO, so it’s even more likely you’re going.”

Gar told him about his sessions with the Kempeitai and the naval intelligence types.

“You went beyond name, rank, and serial number?” Franklin asked. “You
talked
to them?”

He seemed genuinely surprised, even disapproving, so Gar explained his reasoning. “The Japanese here in Japan apparently have no idea of how bad the war’s gone for them. I thought, hell, tell ’em, with a generous measure of bullshit, of course, and maybe open their eyes to the fact that they
can’t
win. Maybe they’ll give up. Plus that guy was going to shoot more prisoners until I gave him something.”

A whiff of acrid coal smoke blew through the boxcar, making everyone cough. Having been around coal, Gar knew damned well that wasn’t quality fuel they were burning.

“Yella bastards’ll never give up,” Franklin said. “We’re gonna have to bomb ’em back to the Stone Age, and then invade.
I’m
not gonna give ’em shit, no matter what they do.”

Gar was about to say that he might be wrong about that, having watched the Priest casually murder two POWs as an inspiration for him to talk.

“Is it true you can’t really bomb Japan from China?” Gar asked.

“We can and we can’t. No escorts can make it that far and back, so we go high. Half the time we can’t see shit on the ground, but we have to drop our loads in order to be light enough to get back. Photo interpreters are sayin’ we’re not doing significant damage. The scuttlebutt is that we’re all goin’ to Tinian pretty soon. Then we’ll get P-51s to come along. You really tell ’em how many subs are sitting offshore?”

“May have embellished it a bit, but, yes, I did. First time I was captured. That’s why I ended up on that carrier—they were going to show me how invincible she was.”

”What do you know about B-29s?”

“Big, go a long way, carry lotsa bombs. That’s about it.”

“Good,” Franklin said. “Stick with that.”

They stopped talking after that. Gar had the clear impression Franklin thought he was some kind of traitor for talking to the Japanese intelligence officers, but he still thought it didn’t matter what they knew. If there were ten subs or even twenty operating off the Home Islands, the point was that they couldn’t leave port without being hunted by an entire
pack
of submarines. The U.S. Navy’s submarine noose was tightening every day. Eventually they’d quit leaving port, and it would be all over.

The train went around a long, squealing curve. That changed the relative wind, and soon they were all sucking coal smoke again. The hood actually helped. He finally fell asleep.

The train’s whistle shrieking into the morning air woke everyone up. They were creeping along the tracks, the regular banging of the wheels on the track seams keeping noisy time. Gar thought he could smell the sea between occasional puffs of coal smoke. Then the air brakes clamped down and they shuddered to a stop. The doors rolled open, and there was the usual shouting in Japanese. When Gar felt his neighbor getting yanked to his feet he got ready to stand up, but nothing happened. He could feel and hear the rest of the prisoners being taken out of the boxcar. For a moment he wondered if he was being taken somewhere else, or for one of those one-way rides out to a swamp somewhere. Then he heard a familiar voice. It was the Priest.

“We go now,” he said.

He stumbled getting up, his knees locking up after a long cold night on the boxcar’s wooden floor. The major steadied him and then tugged on the neck rope. Gar followed, still hooded, and with his hands still bound in front of him by a short hank of manila. They went down the ramp, along what Gar assumed was the platform of a train station, and then into a building. The hood and rope came off once inside, and he was led to a small office in what looked like a train station. Outside he could see the column of hooded prisoners he’d been traveling with. The Priest sat him down in a wooden chair, told him to sit still, and then left the room. He came back with two cups of tea and handed one to Gar. By holding it with both hands he was able to get it to his lips. It was warm and had leaves in it, not stems. It was midafternoon, based on the sunlight.

“Not going to Tokyo?” Gar asked.

The major smiled at him, looking more than ever like a congenial rector at some parish church.

“Yes, we are. I will present you to Kempeitai senior interrogation staff. You have been cooperative, and you will be treated well. They are most interested in talking to you.”

“What about them?” Gar asked, indicating the rest of the POWs.

“They are going to Tokyo as well, but they are going in coastal freighter. You will be traveling on destroyer.”

Gar thought about that. Maybe some of his “mere propaganda” had gotten through. A coastal freighter, even if she stayed well inside, literally hugging the coast, was still going to be living dangerously. With the dearth of targets, the boats had been coming closer and closer inshore, looking for a score. A transiting destroyer, on the other hand, could go really fast, and thereby make it almost impossible for a boat to get set up for a killing shot. From Hiroshima City to Tokyo Bay wouldn’t take very long, and any sub spotting a destroyer going fast would assume there was something bigger in the offing right behind her.

“My own personal destroyer?”

He laughed. “No, Commander. This destroyer is going to Tokyo for far more important reasons. It happens to be the quickest method to get you there, that’s all.”

“And what will happen then?”

“That will depend on you, Commander. The things they want to know from you will be details about your submarines. You boasted that you can see mines underwater. They will want to know how you can do that.”

“Why?” Gar asked.

“Why?” the Priest exclaimed. “Is that not obvious?”

“No, it’s not. Japan is a collection of islands. You are using minefields as
defensive
measures. That makes perfect sense. If we know there is an enemy minefield ahead, we try to go around it, if possible, or we simply don’t go there. If I could tell you exactly how this sonar works, what could you do about it? The answer is, nothing.”

The priest thought about that for a moment, struggling for a reply.

“There’s more,” Gar said. “The most important things about a submarine are its teeth, yes? Its torpedoes. That’s what you worry about. And yet it is
us
who want to copy
your
torpedoes, because they are the best in the world.”

“We would arrange the mines in a different manner, perhaps,” he said. “To confuse your sonar.”

Gar shook his head. “Mines are mines. They are buoyant metal spheres. Filled with explosives and air. They are held between the bottom and the surface by mooring chains, so that they lurk at a prescribed depth from the surface. That’s how they work, they just wait. If a ship or a submarine touches one, boom. That’s all there is to it. You cannot make them invisible. It doesn’t matter if you rearrange them—we can still see them.”

“If we know the details of the sonar, we can perhaps jam it.”

“Sorry, but you can’t jam a sonar, except by using loud, explosive noises, and then your own sonars go blind as well. That is the point I’ve been trying to make all along here, Major. Japan is out of options. That carrier should have had fifteen destroyers around it. It had four. That tells the whole story, and that’s why I’ve agreed to talk to your interrogators. They will absolutely
hate
what I have to say.”

“You talk as if war is over.”

“I think it is. Oh, not actually, not right now. Men will still die. Ships will still be sunk—perhaps like this destroyer we’re going to ride. Cities will be bombed. More U.S. Marines will die on the beaches, and more Japanese soldiers will die in their caves. But on the grand scale, this war is as good as over. The Nazis have their backs to the wall in Berlin on not one but
two
fronts. We are all waiting for Japan to realize that she, too, will soon be surrounded and just stop.”