Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  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.

  Gar spun him around, and they both pushed into that dark passageway where all the pallets were upended. Gar motioned for the major to grab one while he pulled another out from the mess. Another loud bang, and the ship gave a soft but scary 70,000-ton lurch. Gar could hear foam rising over the fantail. He found a coil of rope in the heap of materials and wrestled it and his pallet—his pallet!—out onto the fantail, the major right behind him. Gar opened the coil of rope and tied the major’s pallet to his, leaving a bight on each end so they could hold on to the pallet once they went over the side.

  They actually didn’t have to go over the side. The side came to them in a foamy rush of cold water that swept across the fantail in a hissing series of increasingly larger waves. From up on the flight deck they heard the beginnings of an avalanche of stuff that was now sliding backward along the flight deck. The major was trying to say something, but no words were coming out. The noise got louder and louder—deep rumblings, banging steel inside the ship, and the whoosh of enormous bubbles beginning to pour out of the hull all around them. She was going, and soon.

  Gar clambered up on his pallet and wrapped the bitter end of the rope around his forearm. The major did what Gar did. In a moment they were surfing on a wave of water that was making a waterfall off the fantail as the ship’s stern lifted for a moment. Then she settled back again, and they found themselves being pushed away from her by the sheer volume of water being displaced. Their pallets were flipped several times in the process, but they obligingly popped right back to the surface each time. Soon they were a hundred feet or so away from the ship. The major’s face was white as a flounder’s bottom, but he was still hanging on. At that precise moment the moon appeared from behind a bank of clouds, revealing the full scope of the disaster.

  My God, what a sight, Gar thought. They could see down the entire length of the flight deck as she settled by the stern, heeling over to starboard by at least a 25-degree angle. Those two outward-leaning stacks seemed intent on pulling her over. The two destroyers alongside were backing away to avoid being hit by the stacks. That maneuver sent up a collective wail from the flight deck, where at least a thousand men were sliding across the deck toward the starboard deck-edge catwalks. Gar lay on his belly across the pallet and motioned for the major to begin kicking with his feet to get away from what was coming. A ship that size going down would suck anything within 500 feet right down with her. The major apparently understood and started flailing away, his eyes screwed shut. They had to really work at it because, once the flight deck dipped far enough for the water to reach one of those elevator openings, she’d go down like stone.

  Gar saw one of the destroyers ease back alongside, her bow crunching against the carrier’s side forward of the island structure. The carrier was heeling faster now, and one edge of the flight deck was perilously close to the destroyer’s mast. Some of the officers up on the carrier’s bridge had made it down to the flight deck and were crawling up the inclined flight deck toward the bow. A bright white column of steam erupted from the forward stack, drowning out the cries of the shipyard workers who were trying to get to that destroyer, but it was no use. The destroyer backed away suddenly, and he could see why. The ship was low enough in the water back aft that the after elevator hole was about to start filling. Two more destroyers edged closer to the sinking carrier up at the bow, which was now lifting out of the sea.

  “Harder,” Gar yelled at the major. It wasn’t easy to move the pallets. Both of them were hanging over one edge and kicking themselves forward. The major was kicking as hard as he could, but without knowing how to swim, he wasn’t very effective and began to hold Gar back. There wasn’t a thing Gar could do about that. Then he heard a sound like Niagara Falls behind them. He didn’t look back but kept kicking, hoping like hell they hadn’t been going in a big circle. One of the destroyers began sounding the danger signal on her steam whistle. Gar finally ran out of energy and stopped kicking. He looked back to see the front third of the carrier’s flight deck lifting high into the air, the deck’s white directional lines clearly visible in the dull moonlight. He couldn’t see any more scrambling, tiny figures on the flight deck, but a growing cloud of steam, air, and dust boiled out of the front elevator hole, until it, too, began to fill. A moment later, with a weird groaning noise, Shinano disappeared, sliding stern first into 500 fathoms of water. She left an enormous whirlpool, around which Gar could barely make out the hundreds of heads of the men who’d gone over the side as they followed her down into the depths. A minute later all that remained was that cloud of steam and dust, spreading out over th
e water, as if looking for its source. Gar was overwhelmed. What a colossal waste.

  The fourth destroyer emerged from that cloud and nearly collided with one of the others. She backed down furiously and then came to a stop as the other three tin cans began pulling people out of the water. The major had said that Shinano had sailed with nearly three thousand people on board. There was nowhere near that number of heads visible as the four destroyers hauled them out like herring. Gar and the major were perhaps 500 yards away from the rescue operation by this time. Gar was torn—rescue would be tantamount to a death sentence for him. If nothing else, the survivors would equate Gar with the submarine that had just killed their ship and he’d be torn to pieces on whatever deck they hauled him onto, and who could blame them. On the other hand, his chances for survival out there on a small wooden freight pallet in the cold waters of the North Pacific were those famous two.

  Gar felt the rope tighten and then relax, followed by a frantic, gurgling cry behind him. He looked around for the major, but he was nowhere in sight. There was a slight chop forming on the sea as dawn approached. The skies were clearing enough for him to see a few stars in the western part of the night sky. He was exhausted, thirsty, and, he realized, dangling shark bait right beneath his pallet. He hauled himself up onto the wooden boards, got it off center, and flipped right back into the water. The other pallet was still attached. Gar pulled it to him, tied the two pallets together to make a bigger raft, and tried again. This time he succeeded by doing the old spread-eagle. He lashed himself to the pallet. He put his head down on the rough-sawn boards and closed his eyes for a minute or so. He was out of the frigid water, so now he at least had a chance.

  Within five minutes he was shivering in the light breeze. The air temperature was lower than the sea temperature, so the occasional wave slapping over the semisubmerged pallet actually felt good. He was trying to decide whether he’d survive longer in the sea than on top of it when the pallet bumped into something. He opened one eye and promptly got saltwater in it. Another bump. Then he realized the pallet wasn’t doing the bumping.

  He opened both eyes and was face-to-face with the maw of a large shark. The beast had its head out of the water and was looking at Gar with one of its dead eyes. There was a long strip of what looked like a khaki uniform shirt hanging out of the back of the shark’s mouth.

  Gar stared for a second, his heart starting to hammer, and then raised his arm and smacked the shark across the face. It was like hitting a piece of sandpaper, but the shark blinked once and then submerged. Gar waited for it to mount a full attack, but nothing happened. His hand stung, and he opened and closed it to restore circulation. He scrunched up onto the pallet, to make sure none of his arms or legs was hanging out, and waited to see what would happen.

  A few minutes later came another bump. Gar opened his eyes, unaware that he had closed them. It was darker, but the breeze had dropped. He could smell fuel oil, and he was really cold now, past the shivering stage and entering the early warm-feeling stages of hypothermia. There was something in front of his pallet. He stared into the darkness, trying to make it into a shark, but it wasn’t. It was a human head.

  A body, he thought.

  He considered what to do, but his brain was very sluggish.

  A body.

  A clothed body?

  He crawled a few inches forward on his pallet raft and reached for the head, hoping it was still attached to more than a single bone.

  It was, and he turned it around. The face was Japanese. He felt below the body’s chin and grabbed the collar of a sodden coat.

  It took him ten minutes to get that coat off before the body bobbed away from his grasp. He almost lost the coat, too. Once he got it onto the pallet he rolled himself into it. The edges where a zipper would be didn’t close across his front, but the extra layer of fabric, even wet, felt like a greatcoat. He went back to sleep, praying that it was just sleep and not the end of everything.

  He awoke to full, warm sunlight and the sounds of excited Japanese. As he tried to gather his wits he smelled the pungent odor of dead fish. He opened one eye and saw a small fishing boat about 10 feet away with four elderly Japanese men staring at him and gabbling. He opened both eyes, blinked, and looked again. Standing wide-eyed at the helm of the 40-foot boat was none other than Hashimoto-san.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Gar was almost too exhausted to think. He was desperately thirsty. His forehead felt sunburned, and his feet felt like wet rubber. He realized that he had better not “recognize” Hashimoto until he knew where he stood with the rest of the fishing-boat crew.

  Moments later he was being hauled aboard like some big fish and deposited on the wooden deck. He heard several hissing intakes of breath and the word gaijin several times. The wooden deck was warm and invited him to go back to sleep, but then a bucket of cold seawater hit him in the face, ending that idea. Then came noise. Someone was yelling at him again, someone who wasn’t happy. Best he could tell, all Japs were seriously into yelling and were absolutely never happy.

  Just shoot me, he thought. I am so tired of this shit. Why, oh why, did you bastards come to Pearl Harbor?

  A moment later a light fishnet was thrown over his body, and then he was rolling on the deck as they wrapped him up. Sunlight. Wooden deck. Sunlight. Wooden deck. After three rolls they felt secure and he felt like that famous bug in a rug.

  Another bucket of seawater, and then a face was in his face. He struggled to focus. It was Hashimoto. He was the one doing the yelling, but from the look in his eye, the look the others couldn’t see, he was trying to tell Gar something. As in, keep still, play along, we’ll talk later. Gar closed his eyes, which brought him a swift kick in the ass. Then they dragged him to the back of the boat and tied him to the cleats on the stern. There was a chock through which he could see dozens of small boats combing the sea. Then he could smell bunker oil. The Japs must have called out every fishing boat from the Kure district to search for survivors from Shinano. He didn’t see any destroyers, but they could have been out of his visual range. He wasn’t any less exhausted from being wrapped in the fishnet, so he went back under.

  When next he woke, somebody was gently slapping his face. He opened one eye and discovered Hashimoto kneeling next to him. He thrust a glass bottle of water into his mouth and Gar drank greedily. He pulled it out so Gar could take a breath and then put it back in, as if feeding a baby, looking over his shoulder the whole time. Gar felt the boat’s small diesel chugging away underneath him and realized it was dark.

  “I must hide you,” he said. “They must think you go overboard.”

  “Um,” was all Gar could manage.

  “I cut this off,” he said, indicating the fishnet, “and then put you in the net hole. You stay quiet.”

  “Um.”

  He quickly cut through the netting and then propped Gar upright. With Hashimoto helping, Gar crawled into a small cubbyhole at the back of the boat. It almost wasn’t big enough for his American-sized body. Hashimoto positioned a wooden hatch, thrust another bottle of water into the cubbyhole, and then closed the hatch with his foot.

  “I come for you, by’n’by,” he said. “No noise.”

  The cubbyhole stank of fish, and there wasn’t much air. The diesel kept putt-putting away as Gar heard him walk forward. He drank some more water, then wedged the bottle, which had no top, into a corner. The diesel wasn’t running very well, and its exhaust smelled like popcorn. Gar wondered about that for a good ten seconds before falling asleep again.

  He woke to the sounds of an altercation between the crew of the fishing boat and some nasty-sounding people who were on either another boat or a pier. Gar turned as soundlessly as he could in his hidey-hole and peeked through a crack in the side. The boat was alongside a pier, and the tide must have been out, because the deck of the pier was a good 8 feet above the boat’s gunwales. Three soldiers were standing on the pier. One of them was blistering the air while the other two, their rifles at
port arms, looked bored. From over his head he recognized Hashimoto’s voice answering back.

  The noisy one on the pier listened for a few seconds and then said something to his two cohorts. They shifted their rifles into a hip-shot firing position, and everything got quiet. Then a rope snaked up from the deck to the guy in charge. He held the end of it and waited, while the soldiers kept their rifles pointed down at the boat. Gar couldn’t see who else was on the pier, but he suspected any bystanders had left quickly once the rifles were unlimbered. Then the man on the pier began to pull on the rope, and a basket spun its way up. The riflemen put down their weapons and dumped the contents of the basket, a bunch of fish, into a much bigger basket. They repeated this procedure three times until Hashimoto started protesting again. The guy in charge started looking for a way to get down into the boat but couldn’t find one. He pointed his finger down at the boat and scolded some more. Then all three of them hoisted the big basket of fish and backed out of Gar’s sightline.

  An argument broke out on deck as soon as the soldiers had left. Gar relaxed as best he could and waited. It was early in the morning, and the skies were gray again. He hoped the tide was coming back in soon. Even if it was, it was going to be several hours before Hashimoto could let him out of the hole. That basket of raw fish was going to look pretty good to Gar about then.

  * * *

  By three hours after dark that night, Gar was ensconced in yet another boat. Hashimoto had rescued him an hour after sunset and taken him out onto the pier and then to a ladder that led down under it. They stepped off the ladder into mud that was at least a foot deep, and suddenly Gar couldn’t move. Hashimoto showed him how to use the framing of the pier to pull each foot out, place it ahead of him, and then let it sink back into the ooze again. The mud smelled of dead fish and sewage in about equal proportions. It was truly eye-watering, and each step was a huge effort.