Alt.History 101 (Alt.Chronicles)

by Ken Liu

  The American soldier’s hand slid slowly down the wooden forestock of his Arisaka Type 99 bolt-action rifle. He lowered the attached monopod and rested its heel on the soft ground. The optical scope on his USMC-issued Winchester Model 70 was incompatible with the Japanese rifle, and since he had an abundance of Japanese 7.7x58mm ammunition and no remaining rounds of .30-06 Springfield, he was forced to use the Arisaka and its antediluvian iron sights instead of the Winchester’s comforting 4x fixed-magnification scope.

  The American trained his sights on the sleeping target, then rested his cheek against the cold stock and touched the trigger as if he were caressing the metal with a feather.

  He was Lance Corporal Edward Blake from Richmond, Virginia, and his daddy put a rifle in his hands at age seven. He wore his dogtags around the sock of his left ankle and kept a photograph of a girl from high school, to whom he had never spoken, in his vest pocket. She was the best friend of his brother’s fiancée, and she would have become his wife if he hadn’t joined the Marine Corps at eighteen instead of going on a trip to Mexico with the three of them.

  [“Wind holding,”] whispered Kenishiro, almost imperceptibly.

  Tatsuya had been Blake’s spotter for the whole of their two-year assignment. The pair spoke Japanese by rule, not by choice, as was mandated to every covert shadow team. When in use, their shortwave person-to-person radios could be easily eavesdropped upon, and it was best to let an enemy think he was overhearing a pair of Japanese hunters up until the very moment a bullet penetrated his armored helmet.

  ‘Wind holding’, was the go-phrase, and a few seconds later, Blake’s finger depressed his rifle’s trigger with a steady, practiced pressure. There was a crack from the rifle, and the sleeping man’s body jerked upward. Blood erupted from his chest in a wide blossom and splatted back down upon his lifeless body.

  Kenishiro re-adjusted his binoculars. [“Target eliminated.”]

  Silently, the two soldiers emerged from cover, retrieved the dead man’s papers, and made for base camp.

  * * *

  It was raining the next morning, but the men did not care. Slow, fat raindrops smacked into the bright green fronds all around them. The slope of the mountain behind them was an almost fluorescent slick of lime-colored foliage. Any movement was easily spotted since the three soldiers had uprooted all of the bamboo trees on the slope within one klick of their camp. Before them stretched the northern part of the vast forest of Shirakami-Sanchi, the culling grounds between Noshiro and Aomori, where men were sent to die.

  The razing of trees on the mountain had enabled them to construct a sturdier base than the canvas drapery they had been given as they hopped out of the deployment Huey. The helicopter had been ripped apart in a fiery blaze by a rocket-propelled grenade upon liftoff, the scorching debris ending the lives of three of the five soldiers meant to prevent plans for the atom bomb from reaching the Aomori via the forest. A nuclear facility was under construction outside the port city, harnessing ocean water as coolant, and it was said to rival anything the Americans had so far built for the same purpose.

  * * *

  After the attack on Pearl Harbor wiped out the entire code-breaking Combat Intelligence Unit on the island, including Commodore John Rochefort and his staff, the Americans failed to break the Japanese naval code in time to warn them about the ambush at Midway.

  The American Pacific fleet was devastated, and withdrew for repairs. Money flooded the docks instead of the nuclear furnaces – but only for a time. It was a long enough delay for the Japanese to land on American soil, knowing that no atomic bombs had been dropped on their homeland.

  Four months after the Battle of Midway, six Japanese carriers and a flotilla of cruisers and smaller craft anchored just off the southern California coast, having travelled unhindered through waters now under their control.

  The response was immediate and devastating. One of the carriers was sunk within an hour of visual contact, and the remaining five retreated to deeper waters – but not before deploying their payloads.

  Bombers, fighters, and troop transports poured from the decks, filling the air over San Diego with a roar of foreign engines. It did not take long to establish a small foothold on the shore north of the city.

  And here the Americans made a crucial mistake in guessing the designs of the Japanese, for the invading forces had no intention of holding the beach. American Intelligence suggested the Japanese would try to dig in; to fortify; to hold their ground.

  They were wrong.

  The enemy soldiers refueled their remaining aircraft, and took flight, heading inland. San Diego was a ruin, but it had not been the final target of the Japanese. That destination was in New Mexico, at the headquarters of the Manhattan Project: the Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atom bomb.

  * * *

  It was about this time that PFC Kenishiro and Lance Corporal Blake, having survived the destruction of their deployment helicopter due solely to the heroic actions of Kenishiro (actions for which Blake would forever feel the enormous pressure of an unpaid life-debt), rendezvoused with the only unit assigned to the Shirakami-Sanchi forest in northern Japan, led by Sergeant Frank Alcott.

  There were ten of them in the unit, including the new additions.

  Alcott laid it out simple for them on the first day. He slapped down a tattered map of the region and pointed at different locations with a stubby finger while rubbing his clean-shaven head with his other hand.

  “Aomori is here,” he said, pointing to the lip of the northern bay and chewing on the last cigar he would smoke for almost two years. “Jap relay station is here, to the south of the forest. For some damn reason, Jap HQ keeps sending more of them right through the woods, thinking they’ll get past us. Hasn’t happened yet. Won’t ever happen. But they’re getting smarter. Less shaky. It’s getting harder for us to spook ‘em out of hiding.” He jabbed his stinking cigar toward Blake and Kenishiro. “That’s why you’re here. Command thinks we’re about to see a whole shitstorm of important intel come our way, and we need your eyes. We’ve knocked out all the long-range radio towers within a hundred klicks, and our flyboys have air traffic on lockdown, so the only way they’re passing paper is on foot.”

  “A hundred klicks?” Blake said. “How long have you been out here?”

  Alcott chomped down on the wet end of his cigar and grinned. “Not long enough, new fish. Not yet.”

  * * *

  Two years later, there remained only three men of the eastern military in the forest of Shirakami-Sanchi, and none of them ever grew to love the canvas tent that sagged in the rain and stank of mold. None of them knew carpentry, either, so as best they could, they designed and constructed a low barracks at the base of their mountain. They dug a tunnel ten feet into the slope and six feet high and lined the floor, ceilings, and walls with bamboo they had lashed together for sturdiness. A small awning was added later, at a downward angle from the lip of the entrance so the soldiers could weave vines and branches through it to create a layer of camouflage. This layer needed replenishing when the bright green leaves rotted to brown and stank worse than the old canvas.

  This small task, among many others as seemingly menial, was a thin substitute for the weaving of a genuine social fabric that clothed a larger, more important machine – a machine the soldiers secretly felt as if they had not been a part for quite some time.

  When they had first constructed their shelter, the three soldiers stayed hidden inside it unless they were out on patrol. Shortly after, the German tyrant was dead by his own hand. The Japanese were crawling all over Asia and into Europe after obliterating the Allies in the Pacific, and the three soldiers in the forest of Shirakami-Sanchi hadn’t seen any signs of the enemy in months until yesterday.

  Not long after the news came through of Hitler’s demise, their only working radio broke. Its innards had rusted out, and there were no replacement parts in the limited supplies the soldiers had salvaged from their deployment Huey
. Blake and Kenishiro abandoned all pretenses of camouflage and spent most of their time in the grass in front of their mountain shelter, waiting in a purgatory for word from on high: The war is over. Come home.

  Instead, all the heard was a daily order from Sergeant Alcott to send them on one of twelve well-beaten patrol routes.

  Yet there initial mission was not complete, and they had no way of contacting Central Command. Last they heard, the Japanese were still boring a hole through American defenses in the southwest, aiming for Los Alamos, and neither soldier wanted to be the one to convince the others that they should abandon their post to check on how the boys were doing back home, lest they miss the one bastard carrying plans for a Japanese-manufactured atom bomb.

  And so, as he did every morning, Sergeant Frank Alcott of the United States Marine Corps stood shirtless at the base of his mountain, one booted foot upon a white stump, staring out into the forest as he shaved his neck with a straight razor. He had stayed up late into the night trying to decipher the papers obtained from the Japanese runner. They had proven mostly worthless; a rehashing of information already known – troop movements on the southeastern half of the island, far beyond the reach of Blake’s rifle. With the diligence of a man awarded his rank, he had catalogued the information regardless, on the chance he’d missed a crucial detail.

  Alcott came from a military family, wore no identifying jewelry including his dogtags, was forced to kill the family dog as a boy of eleven because the mutt had run afoul of a soil tiller, had been beaten more by his mother than father for his perceived weaknesses, had been awarded two Purple Hearts in the same war in which he still fought, and had seen more combat action than most soldiers with a career twice as long.

  The metal bucket on the stump next to the sergeant’s booted foot wherein he dipped his razor before touching it to his skin was half-filled with a yellowish tallow from the pig he had skewered two nights previous. Three flies buzzed around the lip of the bucket as Alcott scraped excess tallow from his blade.

  The squad had run out of shaving cream one month after arrival, but before most of them had been slaughtered in an ambush on the north ridge. Alcott used animal fat instead. The other two remaining soldiers used water.

  “I think it won’t be today,” Blake said, emerging through the hanging vines that drooped from the shelter’s awning. He hadn’t shaved for two days. A dark shadow covered his neck and cheeks.

  Alcott dipped his straight razor into the bucket of tallow and scraped at his chin.

  Lance Corporal Blake had stopped expecting conversation. The sergeant rarely spoke but to give orders for an alternate patrol route or the undertaking of a fruitless scouting mission. He had been more silent than usual of late.

  Blake sat on a dirty bamboo stool of his own making and unslung his Arisaka rifle. He cleared the chamber, set the shiny bullet in his lap, and wiped the barrel with an oiled rag. The weapon was as clean as it had been yesterday morning, but the routine was his own, and the routine was important.

  Alcott’s razor stopped on his neck when there was a soft rustle in the dense brush twenty paces from camp.

  “It’s Kenishiro,” Blake said.

  Alcott’s blade held still against his neck as his pale eyes searched the woods. With barely a sound, he jumped forward, scooped up his treasured semi-automatic Mondragon Rifle and fired three quick rounds into the underbrush. A startled copper pheasant took flight, beating its wings and squawking bloody murder.

  There came a lower sound after: a growl almost hidden beneath the beating of the soldiers’ hearts, low and primitive.

  “It’s here,” Alcott whispered.

  “I see it,” Blake said. “2 o’clock, through the bamboo.”

  Alcott swiveled on his heel, the barrel of his rifle tracing a smooth arc until it came to a dead stop in that direction. Two orange eyes were barely visible amidst the green and tan of the bamboo. Feline eyes. Hunter’s eyes. They were eyes that did not belong in Japan. Perhaps the beast was the escaped prize showpiece of a visiting dignitary before the onset of war, or perhaps the Emperor was trying to populate the forests of his own nation with man-eaters.

  “Back again,” Alcott said.

  He raised his rifle to sight down the barrel, and the eyes vanished. Alcott let loose an animal roar and fired into the bamboo, splintering wood until his gun clicked dry.

  Blake turned back and looked into the shelter. There he saw a stack of ammunition boxes as tall as the ceiling piled against the back wall, each box full and unopened. Enough there for ten more years, if the powder was good. Along with several weapons, it was all the three of them could carry from a raid on an enemy outpost ten klicks east last year when their own ammo was on the verge of running out. In truth, they used the very last of it during the attack, and had to resort to bloody hand-to-hand combat to dispatch the outpost guards who survived the initial onslaught.

  “Bastard,” Alcott hissed under his breath.

  That tiger was about the only thing that turned his face red those days. Used to be all a soldier under his command had to do was report five minutes late for patrol duty to send him into a blind rage. Those days – those new, lonely days – Alcott was cold. He was cold to the world and to his men. But that tiger – that tiger was worse to him than the whole of the Japanese army.

  “He’ll come back,” Alcott said, scratching at his throat. His fingernails came away packed with pig tallow. He leaned his rifle against an overgrown stump where it had been previously resting.

  Blake already had his long rifle slung over his shoulder, having put it away as soon as the tiger’s eyes had disappeared. It was a clever beast; one that had never fully shown itself the half-dozen times it approached their camp.

  “Find Kenishiro,” Alcott said. He wiped his hands on his faded black cargo pants. “Walk the north ridge. There’s a buzz in the air.”

  Blake didn’t salute. He didn’t even nod. He simply walked into the dense stand of bamboo in the direction of the tiger, hand resting on his empty sidearm. Rifle bullets they had, but there were no 9mm rounds for their standard-issue sidearms. Blake hypothesized that Kenishiro may have one or two rounds remaining, and Alcott had perhaps five. The only time Alcott drew that weapon was to scratch at the center of his forehead with the sharp nub of the barrel sight, leaving a red abrasion on his skin.

  The tiger was gone. The trees were silent as Blake pushed through the pawing leaves toward the nearby glade, where he knew he would find his spotter. He knew he would find Kenishiro there because yesterday they had killed a Japanese soldier; a runner, most likely from the southern outpost, who had been trying to get intelligence to Aomori.

  It was not any particular news in the letters that made Blake certain to find Kenishiro in the glade. Yet there he found him, alone, seated on a weathered, moss-covered stump, his head downcast, his eyes closed, his back rigid and his hands gripping his knees.

  [“Alcott wants us on the north ridge,”] Blake said, speaking Kenishiro’s native tongue with only a hint of eastern accent.

  “Today I speak English,” Kenishiro said. His eyes remained firmly closed. His short, black hair was dry as straw.

  “I know the drill,” Blake said, resigned to the routine. “Today you are not fit to call Japan your home.”

  His words brought no response from Kenishiro. Blake sighed, absentmindedly looking around the sunny glade.

  “You joined the Marines, Tatsuya?” he asked.

  “Yes,” came the clipped answer from Kenishiro.

  “You joined because you knew the only way to protect your home was to stop the madmen who were ruining your great country.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because Japan is powerful, yet it cannot defeat every army in the world.”

  There was a pause. “Yes.” A hint of slack showed in Kenishiro’s shoulders, but his eyes remained closed.

  “And what we do out here,” Blake continued, “we do because no one else can. Because if we let one of thos
e runners through, it would compromise every American troop in the south Pacific, and in the States.”

  Another, longer pause.

  “Hai,” Kenishiro said, with force.

  “And if that happens, we will hit back even harder, and scores of your countrymen will die without purpose. Painful, awful deaths, Kenishiro-san.”

  “Hai.”

  Kenishiro opened his eyes.

  [“We go to the north ridge,”] he said.

  * * *

  The forest hugged Aomori prefecture on the west, like a crescent moon cradling a piece of fruit, where the fruit housed several legions of enemy ground troops and the crescent moon provided the most clandestine way to pass a coded message to the northern region.

  A low range of tree-covered mountains sliced through the heart of the wood, bisecting it just north of the three soldiers’ camp. Their patrols covered half the range as it ran northeast toward Aomori, as the remainder was considered impassable except in early summer, which was a long ways off.

  There were no night patrols since they had lost the other shadow team along with the Huey and many of their supplies, but there were black bears in the mountains, and at least one nonindigenous tiger whose feeding circuit took it too close to the soldier’s camp. The Japanese seemed to fear these creatures more than most Americans. This was the logic that consoled Blake at night, when he would lie awake imagining enemy runners slipping unmolested through the forest.

  He and Kenishiro encountered neither human nor animal on their rote march to the bottom of the north ridge. On the patrols of their first year, these men adhered strictly to protocol, overburdening themselves with rations beyond their needs to the point of exhaustion. Still, they did not complain.

  After it became clear they were well and truly on their own, the rulebook was rewritten – slowly at first, and without comment. Now Blake brought his rifle and empty sidearm, and Kenishiro his sighting scope and sidearm. Both had canteens and a long-blade knife which was seldom drawn. And that was all.