Page 27 of Daikon

FOURTEEN

THEY STOOD TRANSFIXED BY THE mushroom cloud rising in the north, Colonel Sagara and Keizo Kan and Petty Officer Yagi together.

It was nearly ten kilometers high now, the column contorted and eroded by air currents.

It was so vast that, even at a forty-kilometer distance, it seemed to loom over their heads, the whole of Yuu Airfield engulfed by its shadow.

“That’s no fuel dump,” said Yagi.

The breeze was picking up.

Sagara wheeled about and ran to the Mitsubishi transport. “Finish it!” he called to the pilot, waving the fuel cart away from the plane. “We leave now!”

The breeze strengthened into a stiff wind.

It blew from the same direction as the flash, the same direction as the cloud the light had given birth to, the same direction as the ground-shaking thunder.

It swept across the airfield, raising swirls of dust from which Kan and Yagi were forced to shield their eyes.

Then it died away, leaving the air still.

Colonel Sagara called from the plane. “Yagi-heisō!”

Yagi trotted over, Kan anxiously trailing behind.

“Yagi-heisō,” Sagara began, producing an envelope from his pocket, “by the authority—”

The wind returned, this time from the opposite direction, like a gigantic inhalation following an expulsion of breath.

It blew back across the airfield, racing home toward the north, and snatched the envelope from Sagara’s hand.

Kan lunged for it and caught it as it flattened against the side of the plane.

Then he was doubled over like everyone else, shielding his eyes from the stinging flurry of dust. Then it was gone.

Sagara snatched the envelope back. Had the scientist noticed that it was empty? Sagara gave him a hard, warning look.

“Yagi-heisō,” he said, holding up the envelope like an instrument of unassailable power, “by the authority of the Minister of War, you are reassigned to assist Kan-sensei in his work. You’re coming with us.”

Yagi looked confused. “But I’m stationed at Hikari,” he said.

Sagara stepped into his face. “Stand at attention!”

Yagi straightened his back, eyes front.

“This is a War Ministry order! Understand? A priority matter! Your commanding officer will be informed when we land. Now get on the plane!”

The fuel cart was wheeled away. The Mitsubishi’s engines roared to life.

There were only three passengers aboard: Sagara on the floor on one side of the compartment, using a parachute for a cushion; Kan and Yagi on the other; the bomb components secured to the floor between them.

The transport taxied to the end of the runway, turned into the erratic breeze, and began its takeoff, a lumbering, elephantine acceleration, engines straining, the entire airstrip used up before it took to the air.

The pilot set a course due north after reaching an altitude of five hundred meters, following Sagara’s instructions to fly over the site of the blast. Within minutes the Imperial Navy airfield at Iwakuni was visible on the left.

Sagara peered down at it through the window on his side of the compartment, confirming that the facility and its fuel dump were intact.

Rain began to beat against the window. It ran down the glass, leaving a black residue in angled streaks. Sagara was just starting to notice and puzzle over its meaning when the cockpit door opened and the copilot beckoned to him in alarm.

Sagara pulled himself up, his face flushed deep crimson, and staggered forward, the plane now starting to lurch. The pilot, he discovered, was flying blind, the view through the windshield obscured by whatever filth was suspended in the rain.

“We should turn away,” the man said, his knuckles white on the yoke.

Before Sagara could respond, they were through it, the force of the wind beating the black rain from the glass, leaving a streaked but visible view. And there, up ahead and a few degrees to the right…

Hiroshima.

The city straddled the mouth of the Ota River, where it broke into six tributaries flowing into Hiroshima Bay, like skeletal fingers hanging from a cadaverous wrist. It had been wholly intact up to a few minutes before, untouched, overlooked in the months of American bombing.

It was not untouched now. The city lay in ruins, a field of destruction, countless plumes of smoke rising from fires.

The Mitsubishi once again entered turbulent air, the buffeting nearly throwing Sagara off his feet.

He staggered back to his place on the floor, removing the small packet from his pocket and chewing the remaining headache tablets, the throbbing inside his skull having reached a tearing crescendo.

He had never been prone to migraine headaches, but he was surely having one now.

Squinting with the pain, he stared out the window at the city he had visited twice since the spring, the headquarters of the Second General Army and a major troop assembly area and military stockpiling center.

It was all gone now. The warehouses, the arsenals, the oil and gas storage plants, the communication centers and factories, the hundreds of barracks—all gone.

Gone, too, were the homes of Hiroshima’s large civilian population, the schools and the shops, the hospitals and parks, government buildings, places of employment.

The entire city of Hiroshima had been reduced to ruin beneath a pall of smoke by a single bomb dropped by a lone Special Task Plane.

He cast a hard look across the compartment at Kan.

The scientist had misled him with his assertion that there could be only one bomb.

It was now clear that the Americans had built at least two.

And if they had two, why not a third? And a fourth?

The Americans had mastered the technology of atomic weapons.

And the devastation below was proof that they had no qualms about using them against Japanese cities.

Kan, his face pressed to the opposite window, did not notice the colonel’s sharp look.

He saw nothing but the overwhelming vista below him.

It wasn’t the same as the destruction he had witnessed in Tokyo, a city methodically reduced to ashes and piles of black rubble.

Hiroshima had been laid waste in an instant .

And the city hadn’t merely been burned. It had the look of being crushed, swept away, effaced down to the dirt.

A few more substantial buildings were still standing, scorched and blown-out shells, but virtually everything else, every house, every shop, every wooden structure was… gone .

He fought to push his horror away and come up with some sort of estimate of the power of the bomb, to do something useful.

The damage he was seeing extended six or seven kilometers inland from the harbor, where a freighter lay on its side and numerous smaller craft were overturned.

It stretched an equal distance in an east-west direction before washing up against the barren hills flanking the city.

That made the total area of destruction something in the vicinity of thirty square kilometers.

Yagi nudged him in the side and leaned close to his ear. “Did a daikon do this?” Yagi cocked his head at the gun barrel assembly lashed to the floor. “Same as this?”

Kan glanced across the compartment at the colonel. Sagara, massaging his temples, could not have heard over the engines.

He leaned close to Yagi. “I think so.”

Yagi returned to looking out the window, shaking his head and grimacing as he gazed down.

The Mitsubishi completed its traverse and made a banking turn over the hills to pass over the city again, dropping lower for a closer inspection.

Kan began making out details he had been unable to see on the first pass: figures climbing to the crest of the hill from a neighboring valley, while others gathered at the top, looking down; a cemetery on the slope descending to the city, grass smoldering all around it; a broadcasting tower snapped off; electrical lines downed and sparking; flattened houses burning, no one fighting the flames; black objects floating in the first finger of the river; more black figures scattered about.

Then the Mitsubishi was down to one hundred meters, almost skimming the ground, and Kan began to see the full horror.

He saw a man clawing frantically at the smashed remains of a house; a second figure, burned black but still alive, sitting beside him; a third figure, down on all fours, vomiting like a dog.

He saw people who looked like skinned rabbits crowding the banks of the next tributary of the river, wading into the water to ease the pain of their burns; more bodies floating facedown in the water, drifting with the current; a woman caught against the girder of a bridge, a child strapped to her back, another clutched in her arms, all dead.

He saw a man lying on his back gazing skyward, his face swollen to twice the normal size, his mouth torn from ear to ear in a hideous grin, his stomach ripped open and entrails spilling out. A bony dog was eating.

He saw twenty or more forms moving about on the playing field of a school, black and red creatures.

Were they schoolgirls? Their clothes were torn off, their skins peeled away and hanging like rags.

They were shuffling in a circle, eyes swollen shut and arms raised as if beseeching to heaven, as if they were performing some sort of horrific Obon dance of the dead.

Kan turned away from the window and squeezed his eyes shut. This was more than the destruction of war. This was more than the hatred of men. Hiroshima had been annihilated, pulverized, transformed into a hellscape, complete with lost souls writhing in torment.

Only something otherworldly could have done this.

Something demonic had been unleashed.