Ghosts of Bungo Suido (10 page)

“I’m a professional boozer, Gar,” she said quietly. “You’re just pretending. So, yeah, you’re officially eighty-six. You should be sober when you discover that you’re human, just like the rest of us.”

Gar closed his eyes. He didn’t need this. He was already embarrassed at revealing that finally, the big bad submarine captain was tasting real fear. She reached across the table and took his hand. “Why don’t we go upstairs?” she asked. “Now that you’re done drinking.”

He sighed. He didn’t want sex. He didn’t want any more booze, either—she was right about that. He wanted—hell, he didn’t know what he wanted.

“C’mon,” she said, pushing back her chair.

He looked around the dark lanai, as if not wanting anyone to see them, then recognized how ridiculous that was. He signed his bar chit and followed her through the dining room to the elevators.

Once in her room he sat on the edge of the bed. There were two chairs in the room, but they were covered in clothes and books, so there was nowhere else to sit. Sharon went into the bathroom. When she came back out she was wearing a full-length white slip and nothing else.

“Oh-oh,” Gar said.

She smiled at him and crossed the room, doing something with her hairdo that made it suddenly fall down.

“Up,” she said.

“Up, aye,” he said, trying to think of something really clever to say.

She took his clothes off and then pushed him back onto the bed with one finger. He did as he was ordered, and she joined him, sitting across his hips while she continued to run her fingers through her hair. Gar recognized who was in charge and simply lay back to enjoy the show, Bungo Suido and all its drowned ghosts suddenly forgotten. Sharon proceeded to bend down and apply her lips to his, and after that, to present all the other best parts for similar attention from him.

“Don’t make me whimper,” he said, after a while.

“No whimper, no joy,” she whispered.

He whimpered.

“Atta boy,” she said.

SIX

On the afternoon prior to
Dragonfish
’s departure, Gar was summoned to SubPac headquarters for a final briefing. The summons included the exec, Russ West. They arrived at the headquarters building, with its three-star flag fluttering on an antique yardarm outside, and were ushered into the admiral’s office ten minutes later. Gar was surprised to see that the admiral wasn’t there; the chief of staff, Captain Forrester, was. He was even more surprised to find two Japanese men sitting at the admiral’s conference table. One was wearing the uniform of a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander. The other, much older, was dressed in a long-sleeved white cotton shirt and khaki trousers. Captain Forrester made the introductions.

“Captain Hammond,” he said, “this is Lieutenant Commander Bobby Tanaka from the CincPacFleet intelligence division. Next to him is Mr. Minoru Hashimoto, who has been interned in a POW camp here on Oahu since late 1943.” He turned to the other two. “Gentlemen, this is Commander Hammond and Lieutenant Commander West, the captain and executive officer of USS
Dragonfish,
which is one of our submarines.”

Both of them rose at the same time. Bobby Tanaka shook hands with Gar and West. The older man bowed to them individually but said nothing. Gar tried to estimate his age but found it difficult. He was of medium height and very slim. His hair was almost white and his face severely weather-beaten. His hands and forearms, which he kept rigidly to his sides, indicated that he’d spent many years in manual labor of some kind, probably commercial fishing. Standing next to Hashimoto, Lieutenant Commander Tanaka looked positively elegant.

Gar had met Tanaka before. He was a native-born American whose parents lived in New York City. He had an Ivy League education and, being fluent in Japanese, had probably made some significant, if necessarily classified, contributions to naval intelligence efforts. He’d briefed the sub skippers a couple of times at the Pink Palace, and each time the appearance of a Japanese face in those precincts had caused quite a stir.

Forrester asked everyone to sit down and then took the seat at the head of the table. “Commander Tanaka, would you explain to Captain Hammond why Mr. Hashimoto is going to go out on
Dragonfish
’s next war patrol?”

What?
Gar thought. A passenger? On
this
mission? A POW? Were they nuts?

“Yes, sir,” Tanaka said. “Captain, Mr. Hashimoto was born and raised in a small fishing village just outside of Kure, near Hiroshima City, on the island of Honshu. He started out as a fisherman’s apprentice, eventually owned his own boat and then a small fishing fleet. He lost all that to a typhoon and then set up a small boatyard near the village, where they repaired hulls and engines. Hashimoto-san’s village and boatyard were seized by the army in 1928 to accommodate the expansion of the Kure naval arsenal. The villagers were basically thrown out of their homes and livelihoods without compensation, and if they complained, the provincial governor simply put them in jail.

“When the war began, all of the local fishermen and anyone else connected with the fishing industry were put under the authority of the army military district commander at Hiroshima City. You may not realize this, but Hiroshima is an army city. It contains the Japanese Second General Army headquarters, which controls fourteen divisions in Korea and on Kyushu, as well as the Fifteenth Area Army, which has eight divisions in western Honshu and Shikoku Island. Hashimoto-san was one of thousands of civilians who were suddenly under the control of the Japanese army, not known to be a kind and loving institution. He was captured by the
Albacore
at the end of ’43 off the coast of Shikoku when they shot up a trawler fleet. He was brought to Oahu a month later. He has relatives back on the mainland, who’d left Japan back in 1928 and settled in California. They, of course, are now in one of the internment camps. He’s fifty-nine years old, a widower, and despises what Tojo and the militarists have done to Japan. He’s been cooperative, and looks forward to the day when America defeats the lunatics and can bring sanity back to Japan.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Gar said. “But why on earth do you want to put a civilian on board for a mission like this?”

“Your mission involves a penetration into the Inland Sea of Japan, specifically the straits of Bungo Suido. Hashimoto-san knows those waters like the back of his hand. He’s going to guide you through them. In return, you will at some point put him ashore.”

Gar thought about that for a moment. Then he turned to the old man. “Do you speak English, Mr. Hashimoto?” he asked.

Hashimoto looked over at Tanaka for guidance. Tanaka nodded his head once. “Some,” he said, in the familiar polyglot accent of the local Hawaiians. “Got pretty good pidgin now.”

“Hashimoto-san has been given English lessons in the compound,” Tanaka said. “All the Japanese POWs are learning English. It’s part of, let us say, our conversion program. He understands English better than he speaks it. You’ve heard the Hawaiian locals, Captain. He can communicate as well as they can, once you get used to the dialect. He does, of course, speak fluent Japanese, albeit with a provincial accent. Someone from Tokyo would probably make fun of him. He’s brought along something I think you’ll find to be very useful.”

He nodded at Hashimoto, who reached under the conference table and produced what looked like a rolled-up poster. He stood up, laid this out on the table, and unrolled it, revealing a hand-drawn nautical chart of the western end of the Inland Sea. He slid the chart across the table toward Gar with a short bow of his head.

A treasure indeed, Gar thought, as he examined the chart. Even though he couldn’t begin to read the Japanese kanji characters, he realized that a local fisherman would know things about that area that not even the Japanese naval hydrographers would know.

“Captain Hammond,” Tanaka said, “you need to know that the orders to take Hashimoto-san back to Japan come from the top. It was Admiral Nimitz’s office who asked my boss if there were any POWs here in the Islands who knew Bungo Suido and who’d be willing to help the U.S. Navy.”

“You raise an interesting question, Mister Tanaka,” Gar said. “The question of divided loyalties.”

“Yes, sir,” Tanaka said. “I know, especially when you consider how most Japanese army troops react to the notion of surrender. But Hashimoto-san was a civilian, and he has a very different perspective. All I can say is that when I discuss this with him, he speaks fervently about the coming destruction of his homeland and curses the militarists who have betrayed the Japanese people. The people in the Seto provinces—Seto refers to the Inland Sea—are very traditional, and they’re being treated like medieval slaves. You go ashore anywhere along the Inland Sea and you’re going way back in time.”

“Yet the reason the
Albacore
destroyed Mister Hashimoto’s trawler fleet was because most fishing boats out there are carrying radios and reporting to the military authorities,” Gar said. “They see a periscope, we lose a boat. Excuse me,” he said, glancing at Forrester. “
Another
boat.”

“That’s because they’re required to have a soldier on board any time they go to sea beyond the Seto, even for just a day. The army’s secret police, the Kempeitai, are watching them as much as they are watching the shoreline for intruders and spies. This war has been a disaster for the ordinary people in the countryside, and I think they know it’s going to get worse and that, ultimately, there will be an invasion.”

“That’s very interesting, Commander Tanaka,” Captain Forrester interjected. “But what the captain’s getting at is, can he trust Mr. Hashimoto not to lead them directly into a minefield?”

“Well, first of all, he wouldn’t have had any detailed information about minefields. When they’d go out, they’d be led out by a Japanese navy minesweeper, and brought back in the same way. Hashimoto was no longer going to sea once the war started, and only went back to fishing when they confiscated his boatyard. What he does know is the hydrography of Bungo Suido and its approaches, from both directions. He knows where the deep reefs and ledges are, the deep holes, where mines can and cannot not be planted. Things like that.”

Hashimoto said something in Japanese to Tanaka.

Tanaka rattled off some lightning-fast Japanese of his own. Even Gar could tell the difference in their accents. Hashimoto listened carefully, nodded twice, said the word
hai,
and then asked Tanaka another question.

“He’s asking why your ship is going into the Seto.”

Gar glanced over at Forrester for a cue as to what he could reveal, but the chief of staff’s face was a professional blank. Understood.

“Well, Commander,” Gar said to Tanaka, “I’m supposed to open sealed orders after we leave Guam. All I’ve been told unofficially is that we are to try to penetrate Bungo Suido and, assuming we succeed in getting through, conduct a special mission. Hell, you work at CincPacFleet—perhaps you can enlighten all of us?”

“Sorry, sir,” Tanaka said.

“Cannot or may not?”

“
May
not, sir. Truth is, I
thought
I knew what you were going to be tasked to do, but once this passenger business emerged, all of us snuffies on the intel staff were cut out of the loop. Anyone asking questions gets his head bitten off.”

“Well, then,
you
answer Mr. Hashimoto’s question, because I sure as hell can’t.”

Tanaka said something in Japanese to the old man, who grunted.

“What’d you tell him?” Gar asked.

“It’s a secret,” Tanaka said.

Got that right, Gar thought. He got up from the table and went to the windows overlooking the sub-base finger piers. A secret mission within a secret mission. The carrier was the ostensible objective, although he had no idea of how they would manage that. Either way, he wasn’t going to talk about that in front of a Japanese civilian, and a POW to boot. What upset him even more was that all these clever staffies didn’t trust him, the commanding officer, enough to tell him what the hell was going on here. Besides hurting his pride they were possibly compromising the mission: If he knew what they were really doing, he might be able to do some planning that would enhance their chances for success, preferably before they cut all ties with Pearl and went west. Taking a foreign national, an
enemy
foreign national, along for the most dangerous run of their lives was outrageous. They could get his chart translated if they had to, but there was no reason to let a Japanese, even one who now professed loyalty to the American side, come along.

He made a decision. “No,” he said. “I won’t do this.” He turned to the chief of staff. “I’m the commanding officer of
Dragonfish,
and obviously I don’t really know what this whole mission is about. I don’t think you do, either. The intel officer here says
he
doesn’t know. On top of that, I’m being asked to take a Japanese POW on board on what is an obviously either a highly classified mission or a harebrained idea that nobody wants to own up to. I think you need to get somebody else.”

Captain Forrester stared at him in shock. “Are you asking to be relieved of command?” he asked finally.

“I say again: If my superiors don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s really going on here, then yes, I’m asking to be relieved of command.”

“Think about what you just said, Captain, “Forrester said. “Think hard.”

Gar laughed out loud. “You think I don’t know what people say about me? That I’m some kind of nutcase because I hunt destroyers? You like the results well enough, as I recall, but I’ve seen the looks from the other COs at the Royal. Great score, man, but damn! Well, here it is: You want me to take the Dragon through Bungo Suido? With a Japanese national as my navigator? Then somebody better tell me why.”

He signaled to Russ, nodded to Tanaka and Hashimoto as politely as he could, gathered up his cap, and left the conference room. Forrester looked as if he’d just been slapped with a wet fish.

*   *   *