The Nicholas Linnear Novels (91 page)

Just behind him Gōtarō, acting as navigator for the moment, studied the aerial map of the North Pacific. He glanced at his watch and, leaning forward to make certain Nangi could hear him over the ferocious din of the aircraft engines, said, “We should be sighting them in just under ten minutes, approximately two hundred fifty miles southwest of Guam.” He looked at his map again. “That will put them and us almost directly over the Marianas Trench. That is supposed to be the deepest depression on earth.”

“I know.” Nangi had to yell to be heard. “I’m trying not to think about it. I read somewhere that scientists have guessed it might be more than forty thousand feet deep.” He shuddered.

“Don’t worry,” Gōtarō said lightly, “neither you nor I will touch water on this mission.”

Just over six minutes later, Gōtarō touched Nangi’s shoulder, pointed south. The unbroken skin of the Pacific seemed placid and so flat it might have been a sheet of gunmetal, solid and unyielding. Then, following the other’s finger, Nangi saw the two tiny specks. He made another minor course adjustment.

“Time,” Gōtarō said in his ear.

Nangi was trimming airspeed. “Wait!” he called. But when he turned his head, his friend was already gone. Nangi could picture him slithering down the makeshift tunnel into the dark, cramped, coffinlike cockpit.

“Here I am.”

Nangi heard Gōtarō’s voice emerging through the top end of the speaking tube. He lowered the flaps, and they began their descent. He kept Gōtarō informed every step of the way.

“We’re at thirty-five thousand feet. I can just make out some definition in the target.”

“I’ve got the destroyer,” Gōtarō said. “Just get me there on time. I’ll do the rest.”

Nangi’s skilled hands were busy bringing the plane down on course. He felt keenly the
hachimaki
wound tightly around his helmet and he said, “Sato-san.”

“Yes, my friend.”

What was there to say? “Twenty-nine thousand feet and closing. We’re right on target.” He put his hand up to touch the white cloth fluttering slightly in the chill air.

The sky was enormous. Off to the left, dark cumulus clouds were building along the horizon, and Nangi was mindful of the first abrupt shift in wind direction. Still rich sunlight splattered the target area. The sea stretched away, limitless.

“Twenty-eight thousand,” Nangi said and put his hand on the Ōka release lever. “I’ll give you a second-by-second countdown.”

Gōtarō must have heard something in his voice because he said, “Take it easy now, my friend. Don’t worry.”

“Unlike you, I have no faith to believe in.” Nangi shored up his emotions. The altimeter was hovering near the cutoff point. Soon the Ōka would be but a swiftly falling blossom, dropping toward the bosom of the Pacific. “It is time we said our goodbyes.”

The droning of the wind and then, drifting up to him from the speaking tube, came Gōtarō’s voice, “Today in flower, Tomorrow scattered by the wind—Such is our blossom life. How can we think its fragrance lasts forever?”

There were tears in Nangi’s eyes as he pulled the lever. “Goodbye,” he whispered.

A moment later the rockets came on. Abruptly, the Mitsubishi canted over horribly. At first Nangi thought they had been hit by enemy foe. But they were still too far away from their target for the ships’ guns, and the sky had been clear of enemy aircraft.

Then, with one wingtip pointing toward the roof of the heavens, the nose went almost straight down, and he knew with a sudden chilling certainty what had occurred. The wind was moaning through the stripped down fuselage as he leaned forward, screaming into the speaking tube. “Gōtarō! Gōtarō!”

“I’m stuck in here, still plastered to your underbelly.”

“The rockets are misfiring! I can’t bring the nose up!” Frantically, he worked at the controls, but it was useless, he knew that. They were not meant to correct for 1,764 pounds of thrust.

They were hurtling out of control, heading toward the flat bed of the sea at a heartstopping six hundred miles an hour. Still Nangi did not give up hope and he did what he could to slow their terrific rate of descent. The rockets cut off after nine seconds, but their tremendous initial thrust had done their damage.

“Get back up here!” Nangi cried as he tried to regain control of the aircraft. “I don’t want you in the belly when we hit the water.”

There was no answer but Nangi was too busy at the controls to repeat his urgent message. Now that the rockets were off, some semblance of control returned to the plane. But they were dangerously close to the sea and Nangi realized there was no hope of pulling out of the spin. The Mitsubishi’s twin engines just could not cope with the powerful thrust of the rockets’ misdirected fire.

The airframe was juddering dangerously, and because of the acute horizontal angle with which they were dropping he was afraid a wing would crack off. If that happened, he knew, there would be no chance for them at all. The ungainly craft would plunge like a stone into the wall of the ocean, crushing them instantaneously.

So Nangi abandoned the impossible task of pulling them out of the dive and instead redirected his attention to rectifying the angle. If he could level them off somewhat they would have a chance of survival. The Ōka would be sheared off as they hit, but as long as Gōtarō was out of there that would be all right—the stubby plane would take the brunt of the force.

Out of the windscreen the sky was pin wheeling, merging with the sea, back and forth like a funhouse ride. The fuselage was screaming as the force of gravity applied pressure to the riveted joints. The sea was clear of the enemy and there was nothing on the horizon but the storm piling up, purple and yellow like a bruise.

They were very close to the water now, and Nangi began to hear a high, thin wailing above the rest of the sounds inundating him, and he began to sweat. The top wing had still not come down far enough and now the stress on it was horrendous.

There were only seconds left before he knew it would shear off, plunging them to their death. He did not want to be crushed inside this steel coffin and he worked even more frantically at the controls.

He felt a pressure on his back, then Gōtarō’s big hand gripping his shoulder and he thought, It took him long enough. He was angry with himself and with Gōtarō because of the added anxiety it had caused him.

The sea was coming up fast and now he thought, It doesn’t matter. If the angle doesn’t kill us, the explosives in the nose of the Ōka surely will. But still he worked on, and the upper wing grudgingly began to level off.

They were now no more than five hundred feet off the water and Nangi wondered if he had left it too late because they were falling, falling like a leaf in a storm, the sea coming off its two-dimensional plane, breaking up into light peaks and dark troughs, the dark blue almost black and the last thought whirling around his brain, We’re over the Marianas Trench and if we sink we just might go on forever.

Then the Pacific came up and slammed them so hard all the breath went out of Nangi’s lungs like a balloon bursting. He heard the shriek of ten thousand demons then a quick searing flash of heat and his tiny world collapsed in on him, bolts of pain imploding, nailing him to a cross of agony.

It must have been Gōtarō who pulled him out of the ruined, twisted cockpit because Nangi never remembered climbing out himself. Many years later he would have recurring nightmares about those few terrible, confused moments, no true images coming, only vague impressions, unease, terror, the sense of suffocation, of immobility.

Then the bright sky was above him, a harsh wind scouring his cheeks and the rocking motion of the waves far out at sea. He opened his eyes to a red haze. Pain lanced through his head, and when he tried to move, he could not.

“Lie still,” someone said close beside him. “Lie still,
samurai.
”

His breathing was labored and he fought to speak. But something seemed to be clogging his voice box. His throat felt lined in fire and his mouth was full of cotton. He had a sense of heat again, flames running along his cheeks like tears. A great crackling filled his ears and the stench of smoke clogged his nostrils, choking him. He vomited and someone held his head, wiping his mouth with a smudged white cloth unwound from his head.

His vision began to clear and he saw, rearing up over them, blotting out everything, what he took to be the black fluke of an immense sea creature. He began to whimper, an irrational fear turning his skin wet and cold. Then his head cleared and he saw it for what it was: the tail section of the Mitsubishi. He closed his eyes and lost consciousness.

When he opened his eyes again, the first thing he noticed was that he had lost some depth perception.

“One eye’s out,” Gōtarō said from beside him. “And don’t try to move. Something’s happened to your legs.”

Nangi was silent for a time, digesting this. At last he said one word, “Explosives.”

Gōtarō smiled at him. “That’s what took me so long down in the Ōka. I was working the nose loose. I jettisoned it at about eighteen thousand feet. It made quite a bang.”

“Didn’t notice.”

Gōtarō shook his head. “You were too busy.” His smiled washed over Nangi again, easing his pain. “You saved us, you know. The minute those rockets misfired I was certain we were dead. We would have been but for what you did.”

Nangi closed his eyes. Saying three words had depleted all the strength that was left him.

When he awoke again, Gōtarō was bent over his legs, trying to do something.

“What’s going on?” Nangi said.

Gōtarō turned quickly away from what he was doing. “Just checking on your wounds.” His eyes slid away from Nangi’s toward the heaving sea.

“No land.”

“What?” Gōtarō said. “No. None at all. I thought we might be close enough to one of the Marianas, but I don’t think that’s the case now.”

“Noguchi will find us soon enough.”

“Yes,” Gōtarō said. “I suppose he will.”

“He’ll want to know what went wrong. All the vice-admirals and admirals in the Imperial Navy will want to know. They’ve got to get us back safe and sound.”

Gōtarō said nothing, his gaze roving this way and that across the water.

“Where’s that storm we saw before?” It was difficult for Nangi to talk and he was monstrously thirsty. But he would not give it up. In the silence the thought of the awesome yawning Trench falling away below them would fill his mind with dark twistings and his stomach would lurch and he would begin to retch in irrational tenor.

“The wind hasn’t shifted yet,” Gōtarō said absently. “It’s still hanging in the northwest.” Clearly his mind was on other matters. What they were Nangi could not guess. Nor would he ask.

There was a silence between them then. Just the wind whistling, a constant force against them like an invisible wall, and the long up-and-down motion caused by the swell of the sea, sickeningly regular. Nangi longed to see even one gull, pulling and swooping across the barren horizon, harbinger of land.

He was still wet, and the wind crawling through the rents and gaps in his uniform caused his skin to raise itself in gooseflesh. His bladder was uncomfortably full and, grunting with the effort, he turned heavily away from Gōtarō, urinated awkwardly, trusting for the wind and the motion to take it away from them.

It was true, something was wrong with his legs. He willed them to work and they would not. Painfully he raised himself up and grabbed at his flesh. He could feel nothing; his legs might have been made of wood.

To take his mind off the numbing thought of paralysis, he began to look around him. For the first time he noticed what it was they were riding on. It was part of the heavily baffled bulkhead from the Mitsubishi. In this case the modifications had worked to their advantage. All the heavy insulation against ground and air fire which would have pulled them down into the sea had been stripped away, replaced by lightweight baffling that trapped air in its webbing.

Nangi grunted to himself. Noguchi and the admirals would be happy with that knowledge, he thought ironically. Even if their precious
Cherry Blossom
refused to fall.

Exhausted, he lay back down, closing his eyes, but the lurch and drag of the heaving tide was not conducive to rest. He looked at Gōtarō. He was sitting cross-legged, still as a statue. Perhaps he was praying. Perhaps he felt no fear. If that were the case, Nangi envied him.

Fatigue and shock caused his mind to wander. He was no longer aware of whether he was awake or asleep. On the borderline, in twilight cerebration, all the black unnameable fears he had been harboring took hold, gaining ascendancy in his world.

He was aware of his own isolation, of himself as a lone bobbing speck, totally exposed and defenseless. He saw himself on the makeshift raft, felt the pain of his wounds, even the intermittent bursts of warmth amid the otherwise chill of the unforgiving wind.

And abruptly he was no longer alone, for rising like some demon phantasm from the bottomless depths of the sea below him was a terrifying shape. Oh, and how the waves rose higher all about him as if an invisible storm had come up. Great black pyramids built and crested dangerously high, pulling him downward, spinning him into cavernous troughs as endless as tunnels.

Terrified, he clung to the rough surface of his raft, his heart beating triphammer hard, paining his chest, as he waited for what he knew must come.

And then it did breach the water, a monstrous creature from the lightless ocean depths, so enormous it blotted out the stars in the sky: a kraken with glowing eyes and gaping jaws and long writhing tentacles like cables.

Nangi’s eyes bulged and he screamed.

Gōtarō shook him awake. “Tanzan. Tanzan!” he called urgently in his ear. “Wake up! Wake up now!”

Nangi’s eyes flew open. He was drenched in sweat which, cooling in the gusting wind, sent chill shivers running through him. It took him several minutes to focus his good eye. Then he saw the look on his friend’s face.

“We’re in trouble.”

“What is it?” Nangi had to talk around his tongue which seemed swollen and recalcitrant. “The enemy?”