Page 12 of Daikon

SIX

IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK IN the afternoon when the train jolted to a stop in Hikari, on the Sanyo Main Line near the southwestern end of Honshu.

He was seven hours late, Keizo Kan anxiously noted, an image of Colonel Sagara’s glaring eyes flashing through his mind.

He retrieved his bag and the equipment case from the overhead rack and joined the line forming in the aisle between the hard wooden benches—mostly men in uniform, for this car was reserved for military personnel.

“No civilians!” an imperious lieutenant had bawled at him when he boarded, obliging Kan to produce his War Ministry pass.

The scientist’s journey had begun twenty hours before, with a ride west across Tokyo in the sidecar of a motorcycle to Tama Airfield.

He was hustled onto a Nakajima twin-engine transport, the last passenger to be seated on the benches lining the sides of the compartment, and the only civilian aboard.

The aircraft took off and banked toward the southwest, staying low—to avoid the attention of enemy fighters, the officer seated beside Kan explained.

There was no window for Kan to look out to scan the sky for approaching destruction.

He leaned back against the vibrating side of the aircraft and let his eyes drift closed.

It was only then, enveloped in the drone of the engines, that he was able to properly consider the object he was heading off to examine.

If it was indeed a uranium bomb—an unthinkable proposition, but assuming it was—it would need to contain two masses of uranium: a projectile and a target; two masses to be brought together to form a critical mass.

And if twenty-five kilos of uranium had been recovered from it without mishap, then there should logically be a second mass, a similarly sized mass, still hidden inside.

So that meant possibly fifty kilos of enriched uranium, not twenty-five.

Fifty kilos! The idea was outrageous. The Americans could not be so far ahead in developing an atomic bomb.

If they were, the pitiful failure of Project Ni-Go would be too much to bear.

The Nakajima had made it as far as Nagoya when a report of enemy fighters in the area forced them to land.

Kan and his fellow passengers spent the night in a hangar, camped out like refugees with their baggage, their uncomfortable rest disturbed twice by the wail of air raid sirens.

They finally took off again the next morning, completing the flight to Hiroshima in less than two hours.

From the airfield, Kan walked to Hiroshima Station to continue on to Hikari by train.

Hiroshima, he was surprised to observe, was virtually untouched by incendiary bombing.

The year might even have been mistaken for 1942, when Japan was all-victorious, before things had gone so disastrously wrong.

But the signs that it was August 1945, even here, soon became apparent as he made his way to the station.

They were in the fire lanes torn through the heart of the city, bare swaths where houses had been dismantled to halt the fires that hadn’t yet come.

They were in the crude bomb shelter trenches and shoulder-deep “octopus holes” that had been dug beside streets and in the gardens behind houses for people to crouch in.

They were in the desperation of the slogans plastered on billboards and painted on walls, urging to mobilization the “One Hundred Million,” the collective population of Japan and its colonies of Korea and Taiwan.

Nowhere did Kan see the exhortation Ichioku Isshin , “One Hundred Million Hearts Beating Together,” so popular in the heady early days of the war.

Instead it was Ichioku Kirikomu that he saw painted on the soot-blackened wall of a factory: “One Hundred Million Slashing into the Heart of the Enemy.” And farther along, another slogan, even more recent, displayed beside a boarded-up sembei cracker shop.

Ichioku Tokkotai , the four characters read: “One Hundred Million as a Suicide Squad.”

He arrived at the station and joined other travelers waiting on the platform for the train heading south.

A speech was blaring from a loudspeaker installed under the rafters.

Kan moved as far away from it as he could and sat on his heavy case, fanning himself in the midafternoon heat.

A formation of housewives under the command of a weedy policeman were drilling with bamboo spears on the other side of the tracks.

Their anemic thrusts did not appear deadly.

“… The Okinawa Campaign must be viewed as the first step in a great victory. Yes, the enemy secured his hold on the island. But at a tremendous cost! Thanks in large part to the ardor and the spirit of the Special Attack Corps, more than six hundred enemy ships were sunk or otherwise incapacitated, many with all men and matériel on board. This teaches us a valuable lesson. It points the way forward to ultimate victory! When the enemy attempts to land on our home islands…”

Keizo Kan boarded the train.

Hikari was a small provincial town with a tiny station building, not the sort of place where one might be overlooked in a crowd.

Kan looked around expectantly after alighting from the carriage, but no one seemed to be waiting to meet him.

The train gathered steam and chugged off down the tracks.

Other arriving passengers filtered away.

Then the station was empty and he was alone.

The stationmaster gave him directions to the naval facility, east along the street that ran in front of the station, then across the bridge, about a kilometer and a half.

Kan walked. The wooden equipment case was awkward and heavy, and his People’s Uniform was sweated through by the time he arrived at the gate.

He identified himself to the guard on duty, who made a call from the telephone in the guardhouse.

After a few minutes a sailor came sauntering out to the gate.

He had a hard face and was powerfully built under his sweat-stained shirt.

He approached Kan with the hint of a swagger. There were scars on his neck.

“Keizo Kan-sensei?” he said.

Kan said that he was. The man made a perfunctory bow.

“Petty Officer Second Class Ryohei Yagi. I was in charge of recovering the object.” He jerked his head in the direction of the administration building behind. “I’ve been ordered to assist you.”

They proceeded onto the base, Petty Officer Yagi leading the way with Kan’s small bag.

Kan insisted on carrying the wooden case himself.

The place was drab, unpainted wooden buildings and barracks, industrial structures fronting the river.

A concrete quay nearly a kilometer long extended into the mouth of the river, creating a sheltered wharf where two small vessels were moored.

The open water of the Inland Sea lay beyond.

Kan was led first to one of the barracks buildings, where a private room—Western cot, desk, and chair—had been prepared for his use.

A bath was next, a rare treat for which Kan was grateful, followed by a meal brought to his room on a tray.

White rice, a grilled piece of mackerel, miso soup, pickles—simple fare before the war, but the best meal the scientist had eaten in weeks.

By the time PO Yagi returned, Kan’s head was nodding. He was falling asleep.

The evening clouds were darkening as they made their way across the compound, Kan with the wooden case in his hand.

A low rumble of thunder sounded in the distance.

Yagi gave an account of the object’s recovery and subsequent examination as they went along, adding a new detail that Kan found alarming.

The petty officer had apparently delved deeper into the device in the past forty-eight hours.

They turned onto a cracked concrete roadway and followed it to a weathered building standing by itself near the fence at the southern edge of the base.

It commanded a view of the Inland Sea, an expanse of gray fading into the distance to join with the sky.

Kan paused for a moment to take in the view: the headland to the east; the small island a few hundred meters offshore; the large mass that lay to the west, a dark smear in the mist, the unseen sun setting behind it.

“Kasado-shima,” said Yagi. He pointed southwest. “Kyushu is there. You can see it on a clear day.”

He opened the double doors of the building and turned on a switch.

Two naked bulbs hanging from cords bathed the interior in a warm glow.

It was a large workshop, spacious enough to accommodate a truck, smelling of old dusty grease, turpentine, sawdust, gasoline.

There was a workbench along one wall, a selection of greasy tools scattered about, the chains of a hoist hanging down from stout beams. And in the center: something large, hidden under a tightly lashed-up tarpaulin.

Yagi unfastened the cords and pulled back the canvas, revealing a heavy trolley, a bed of oil-stained railway ties on iron wheels. It held something that Kan had to admit looked very much like a bomb. A very large bomb. Two pieces of wood nailed to either side of the trolley bed held it in place.

Kan set down his burden and stood for a moment contemplating the object. Yagi leaned against the workbench, crossed his arms, and began contemplating Kan.

The scientist took a step closer to the thing.

The casing, black, had been swept clean but still showed signs of dirt, caught in the crannies and seams that ran down its length.

A large cavity was exposed in the nose. The component that had filled it—Kan assumed that this was what lay on the floor beside the trolley, the meter-long lump hidden under a scrap of canvas.

This was what had brought him to Hikari.

He reined in his excitement. He would proceed methodically, one step at a time.