As they passed through the gate, a deep hum filled the air. The gate guards looked up at the bright blue sky. One pointed at the long white lines of contrails.
“B-niju ku,” he said. B-29.
Niju, twenty. Ku, nine. Ku had another meaning: suffering and pain.
The Japanese forbade the prisoners looking up when planes were overhead, but Charlie snuck a glance. A B-29 Superfortress roared high in the sky, the sun gleaming along its silver fuselage. Even at its dizzying altitude, far above where Japanese interceptors and AA fire could reach, it was a giant.
The air raid siren didn’t sound in Miyazaki, not for a single plane. This B-29 was only taking intelligence photos.
Laying the groundwork for invasion.
President Roosevelt was dead. The news had hit Charlie like another gut punch from Chiba. His captors told him somebody named Truman was now president. Apparently, Roosevelt had dumped Henry Wallace and picked somebody different to be his running mate in last November’s election.
Whoever he was, the man had big shoes to fill. President for twelve years, Roosevelt led America out of hard times and into war. He’d given his country the New Deal and rallied its people after Pearl Harbor. For more than two years, the commander in chief had fought a global war on two vast fronts.
Charlie had worried the new president lacked Roosevelt’s resolve to pursue the war until Japan’s unconditional surrender, the only way to prevent America refighting the war in twenty years.
The steady flow of B-29s over Kyushu told him Truman was willing to go all the way.
In silence, the guards watched the Superfortress cross the sky, probably understanding their fate was sealed. The plane’s mere presence contradicted the vast amount of propaganda forced down Japan’s throat by its weakening military.
Seeing the great B-niju ku, hearing the news of air raids on Tokyo and other cities, the message was loud and clear. America was coming.
Even if you kill me, Charlie thought, I’ll win.
Then Morrison chuckled and said, “Beautiful!”
Charlie gaped at him for speaking his thoughts. The gate guards wheeled with a collective snarl. Lance Corporal Chiba was already stomping toward him from across the compound. “Nante iimashita ka. Keiotsuke!”
Morrison stiffened to attention and bowed. Swept up in emotion, he’d made a horrible mistake.
Fury masked Chiba’s face. He already gripped his club in one chubby fist. While he couldn’t knock the B-29 out of the sky, he could vent his hatred on this American.
Charlie drew a deep breath and yelled, “God bless America!”
The words stunned Chiba.
“I think this is goodbye, Morrison.” Charlie’s voice cracked as he realized what he’d done. “You’d better get out of here. Good luck to you.”
The corporal was screaming at him. “Shizuka ni shiro yo! Keiotsuke! Keiotsuke!” Shut up! Attention! Attention!
Charlie stood at attention as ordered and raised his hands over his head.
Redirecting Lance Corporal Chiba’s rage had been instinctive. He’d known the brutal guard, who’d often singled out and pummeled Morrison for various infractions real and imaginary, would have killed him this time. Charlie had opened his mouth without thinking, but now he was terrified. His legs trembled and barely held him up as he waited for the first blow.
“Gomen-nasai, Heicho Chiba,” he apologized, bowing his head.
“Warui ko,” Chiba snarled. Bad dog. Then he lashed out.
The club struck Charlie’s shoulder, shooting a bolt of pain up his neck and into his brain. He staggered but remained at attention. Anything other than submission only earned a worse beating. The trick was to ride it out until Chiba grew tired or bored, if one could call that a trick.
The next blow cracked his head. The lights went out. He came to with his legs dragging beneath him, the gate guards hauling him up by the arms. His left ear rang with an impossibly loud, painful hum.
“Keiotsuke!” Chiba ordered.
More blows smashed into his arms, stomach, legs, knees, spine, head. He collapsed again, plunging into oblivion, only to be revived once more.
“Keiotsuke!”
Charlie spat blood and teeth fragments. He struggled to rise, his body refusing to obey, his vision throbbing with anguish.
“Keiotsuke, kono yarou!”
Hands heaved him to his feet.
The world spun before resting on a permanent tilt.
Chiba reared and swung for the bleachers.
Then the lights went out for good.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FINAL INTERROGATION
“Why did you join the Navy?” Nakano said.
Charlie sagged in the chair. His recovery in the infirmary had taken over a month. Bedridden, he hadn’t been able to exercise his legs to stave off the beriberi symptoms. Every part of him still ached as if he’d broken into pieces and been reassembled wrong. Even breathing hurt.
He had only a hazy recollection of what had happened to him. He was partially deaf in his left ear. Between his beating, the thiamine deficiency, and the scurvy inflaming his joints, he could barely walk.
He said, “I thought you said we were done.”
For eight months, he’d suffered. He’d taken everything his captors had thrown at him. They could do nothing more to hurt him.
Because if they did, they’d kill him, and his suffering would end.
“Why did you join the Navy?”
It was hard to talk past the pain, which filled his every waking moment and colored his every thought. “I wanted to do my duty. I wanted to find out what I was made of.”
Nakano said, “If I had a mirror, I could show you. You’re meat. The rest is just a story you told yourself to make it all mean something.”
Charlie stared dully at him and shrugged. His story may not have mattered to anybody else, but it still mattered to him.
“I’m sending you away from the camp,” the interrogator told him. “One more duty to perform. One last chance to find out what you’re made of.”
Charlie struggled to sit upright. “No.”
“Why does this upset you?” Nakano tilted his head, puzzled. “If you stay, Chiba will beat you again. He’ll kill you. You know that.”
“I don’t want to leave my shipmates.” He’d given up hope of making it home himself. If Chiba didn’t murder him, the camp would.
“Not that you’ll fare much better where I’m sending you,” said Nakano. “Your story, my friend, is coming to an end.”
So that was it. The “duty” the interrogator had referred to was his trial and execution for propaganda purposes.
Charlie set his jaw. “You want to hang me as a war criminal, go ahead. I won’t sign or make any statement agreeing to your lies.”
“You wouldn’t be hanged. We’d cut off your head with a sword. But I’m not sending you to Tokyo for propaganda, though I admit that was my plan. My request was rejected. Instead, I’m sending you to China. Manchukuo, to be specific.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A very important man wants to meet you.”
Thoroughly confused now, Charlie gaped at him.
“General Okamoto, the Kwantung Army, has a long memory. He wants to meet the captain who sank the Roiyaru Maru and murdered his men in the water.”
“Captain Moreau’s dead. And Captain Harrison went down with his ship.”
“It doesn’t matter. The general wants to meet the captain of the Sandtiger, and I cannot refuse the general’s request.”
“Harrison and I stopped the shooting.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Nakano repeated. “We are writing a new story. You are now Captain Harrison, who will atone for his war crimes in the Japan Sea.”
“I won’t play along with your crummy charade,” Charlie growled.
The interrogator took out his cigarette case. “Now we come to the part where you do your duty one last time. If you don’t go, I’ll send Lieutenan
t Grady.” He opened the case and extended it to Charlie. “Cigarette?”
All this time, they’d played a game. Two actors in the same movie, speaking lines memorized from different scripts. At last, Nakano had gotten them on the same page.
His hand shaking, Charlie accepted the cigarette. The interrogator leaned across the table to light it for him. He drew deep and let it out. “I’m Captain Charlie Harrison.”
He said it with relief.
“Good man,” Nakano said. “You’ll regret your decision once Okamoto gets his hands on you, but I admire your courage and sacrifice for your comrade.”
“Speaking of which, I have a condition.”
“You want your comrades moved to the base camp. That is acceptable. I’ll arrange it.”
“Thank you,” Charlie sighed.
He’d often asked himself what he was willing to die for. The only certain answer he had was to save his shipmates.
It wasn’t a hard decision to make. Like Nakano said, he was going to die anyway. Either Chiba or the special camp’s brutal conditions would finish him before the war ended. The interrogator hadn’t rewritten his story. No, he’d given Charlie the opportunity to finish his own.
To end his story with meaning.
“And I have a last request.”
Nakano shrugged. He’d consider whatever Charlie asked.
Charlie said, “I want you to make sure my letter gets to Evie after I’m dead.”
An air raid siren wailed in the distance.
The interrogator blanched at the ceiling. “If we survive long enough for me to send it, I will do this for you.”
Minutes later, the ground shook with the thunder of thousand-pound bombs falling on Miyazaki from 30,000 feet.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WAIKIKI
November 1944.
Braddock sat on Waikiki Beach, watching the idiots laugh and splash in the surf at the Royal Hawaiian. Past them, far out on the hazy blue, a submarine cruised the surface, returning to the war.
That’s where Whitley found him, sitting on the hot sand, surrounded by empty beer cans, celebrating Roosevelt’s re-election.
“Hey, Chief.”
“Hey, what.”
“I’m being reassigned. They’re putting me on a relief crew.”
Braddock shook the can in his fist. Still half full. He took a long swig of the warm beer and finished it with a belch. “Good for you, Shorty.”
“Not when you hear where I’m being posted.”
“Midway?”
“Yup.”
“It could be worse,” Braddock told him.
The kid could be Captain Harrison, rotting in a Japanese prisoner of war camp while sneering guards shoved bamboo up his fingernails.
“Yeah, I guess.” The boatswain’s mate fidgeted, pawing a groove in the sand with his shoe. “I just came to let you know and to say thanks for everything. I don’t think I would have made it off the boat if it weren’t for you.”
Whitley would spend the rest of the war fighting boredom on Midway, drinking hooch made from pineapple juice mixed with 180-proof grain alcohol syphoned from torpedo motors. Why did a moron like Whitley live, while a hero like Gentry died? Why had Braddock lived?
He shook a few of the cans that were sticking out of the sand like moai statues. All of them empty. He had this dumb kid thanking him, and he was out of beer.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Now get lost.”
Thanks to Braddock leading the crew off the dying Sandtiger, Whitley would go on with his mediocre existence. Meanwhile, idiots on liberty would go on laughing and playing in the surf. The warships would come and go out there on the big blue, fighting their endless war. The world kept turning.
For three weeks, he’d tried to forget the horrifying isolation he’d experienced while floating to the surface. The terror of looking death in its empty face. The guilt of surviving while good men like Spike and Pearce went down with the boat.
Before the Sandtiger dropped into the crushing depths, the high-pressure air in the tanks had run out. The last men had to go up without a Momsen lung. They either ran out of oxygen along the desperate climb or ascended too quickly and got the bends, thrashing and screaming until the ocean dragged them back down.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t forget any of it.
None of which was Whitley’s fault.
Braddock appreciated the honesty of guys who were openly assholes, but he hated bullies, drawing a fine but clear line between the two.
“Sorry, Shorty,” he said. “Forget it. Take care of yourself.”
The kid didn’t answer. When Braddock looked, he found Whitley had made tracks for wherever the Navy had billeted him. Which was just as well because Braddock was the kind of guy who rarely offered an apology and had a way of making whomever he gave it to sorry he’d gotten it.
After the Japanese ships had turned and steamed over the hill, a destroyer found the Sandtiger’s survivors and picked them up. Then it was one debriefing after another, shuttling between ships until boarding a transport returning to Guam. From there, a bumpy flight to Pearl on an empty cargo plane.
Another debriefing at the Submarine Base along with accommodations at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. He was rooming with the aristocracy now. He used to have to sneak onto the grounds to sit under the banyan trees, but now he was a chief petty officer and a hero to boot. With his pay bulging in his pocket, he toured Hotel Street, crowded with servicemen and MPs and bouncers. He ate at Wo Fat’s and had two drinks, the legal limit, at Bill Lederer’s.
At the next bar, Braddock met an IRS agent who said he calculated the brothels’ tax base by counting towels sent through the local laundries and then multiplying by $3, the cost of a trick. This inspired him to walk to the Black Cat, located across from the YMCA at the end of the street, and stand in line until taking his turn receiving three minutes of loving attention from an attractive and efficient prostitute.
For the next two weeks, he repeated this routine, days sunning at the beach and nights carousing on Hotel Street, until he’d burned through his pay. And all the while, he put it off but could not put it all behind him.
Soon, his languishing would end. As with Whitley, the brass would reassign him. He could go back to the Proteus and work for Lt. Commander Harvey, who was only a slightly bigger fool than most, and wait out the end of the war.
While Harrison struggled to survive.
Even now, 4,000 miles away, the son of a bitch wouldn’t let him quit. He was out there, suffering torture, while Braddock’s biggest worry was catching a sunburn. With his captain held captive, Braddock couldn’t take any satisfaction knowing he’d finish the war in relative safety behind the lines. If he did, Harrison would somehow win. Or Braddock would somehow lose; he wasn’t sure.
The captain had seen something in him he didn’t see himself.
Which made one of them an idiot. And given one, or both, a responsibility.
A shadow fell over him. He looked up, expecting Whitley, but instead, a yeoman gazed back at him. Behind the kid’s head, the tropical sun blazed high in the sky.
The yeoman smirked at this big gorilla lounging on the sand in his swimming trunks, shoulders burned red and a wrinkled peaked cap perched on his skull. “You Chief Braddock?”
He sighed. “I might be. Who’s asking?”
“ComSubPac is asking. Admiral Lockwood wants to see you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
WAR HERO
Sitting in the drab Navy office with Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood and Captain Avery Copeland, Braddock smelled a con.
Copeland was a public relations officer. A professional con artist.
“The loss of the Sandtiger is a major blow to the Submarine Force,” Lockwood droned. “Yet Captain Harrison’s attack on the Yamato may have changed the outcome of the battle and saved countless American lives.”
“Yes, sir,” Braddock muttered.
“Just as extraordinary was your
heroic leadership in getting the crew off the sinking submarine. It’s the first time it’s ever happened.”
“Spike Sullivan’s the man you want to thank, sir. The COB. We wouldn’t have gotten off that boat without him holding depth as long as he did. He died doing it.”
The heroes of the Sandtiger had ended up dead or captured, but everybody else kept trying to turn him into one.
ComSubPac lit a cigarette and studied him through the smoke. “You were the first to go up to the surface.”
“Yeah. Sir.”
“You released the buoy. Tied off the raft. Otherwise organized the evacuation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then that makes you a hero, son, whether you like it or not. Sullivan sacrificed himself to save his crew. You led them off. It’s not a contest. You’re both heroes deserving commendation in my book.”
Restless and irritable, Braddock fidgeted. “Thank you, sir.”
“I’m putting you in for the Navy Cross to go with that Silver Star I pinned on your chest after Saipan. Understand?”
“I’m honored, sir.”
“I’ve been looking forward to talking to you but wanted to let you enjoy your liberty first,” the admiral said. “I take it you’re rested? Ready for duty?”
“I am.”
“Good. Captain Copeland has a very interesting proposition for you.”
Here it comes, Braddock thought.
Copeland leaned to the edge of his seat and smiled. “It’s a real honor to meet you, Chief Braddock. Getting off that submarine was a hell of a thing.”
“Uh-huh.” Braddock didn’t like the look of the man. Prim and proper, his platinum blond hair combed neatly to the side. Though a PR officer, Copeland didn’t come across as smarmy or fake, which Braddock could have dealt with head on. No, the captain seemed genuinely excited to be in the presence of a war hero.
A true believer type. The worst kind in Braddock’s book. The kind who fought for flags and ideals. Even Harrison had enough sense not to buy too much into all the patriotic floy floy.
“It’s an inspiring story,” Copeland gushed. He raised his hands as if framing a picture. “David and Goliath. One of the most decorated and successful submarines in the service makes a daring surface attack against the Japs’ biggest battleship to save the invasion fleet.”
Over the Hill: a novel of the Pacific War (Crash Dive Book 6) Page 6
