Page 28 of Daikon

He reluctantly turned back to the window to bear witness.

The smoking remains of Hiroshima Castle were passing below, dozens of bodies strewn about, most still, a few attempting to crawl; the military airfield where Kan had landed, a line of destroyed planes still smoking; the station where he had caught the train to Hikari, platform roof toppled; the field where he had seen the women drilling with spears, the grass burnt black, a seared horse dragging its innards.

Then they were climbing over the western hills and the city was gone.

He settled back onto the parachute on the hard floor, the vibrations of the engines passing up through his body.

Thirty square kilometers.

His estimation of the area of damage returned to his mind. Those glimpses of horror—they extended over thirty square kilometers. Or more.

Awe entered into Kan’s confused thoughts, the realization that the Americans possessed a weapon that no military on earth could resist. And then something else: a feeling of shame.

Was it shame that he and his colleagues at the Riken had achieved so very little?

They had not only failed to develop a uranium bomb for Japan.

They had given up after the first few clumsy attempts, consoling themselves with the assumption that developing such a weapon, even for the Americans, would take decades.

What a miscalculation! What a spectacular delusion!

The idea occurred to him as Hiroshima faded behind them that he and everyone associated with Project Ni-Go should consider killing themselves—which only deepened the shame, for he had always disdained such notions as old-fashioned.

He also suspected that he lacked the courage to do it.

But what if Project Ni-Go had succeeded?

Kan had never really considered that outcome.

He had immersed himself in experiments and theories and never gave any thought to the real-world applications, so distant was the prospect of developing an actual bomb.

But now, having seen what Hiroshima had become, having seen what could be on his hands…

If only he could get Noriko freed. They would escape into the mountains or to some remote place and never come back.

He glanced across the compartment just as Sagara was slipping a tablet into his mouth from a little green bottle he had extracted from his pocket.

Kan recognized what it was: Philopon. The drug had come to be widely distributed in Japan over the past three years as a stimulant that allowed the user to work longer hours for the good of the nation.

Several of Kan’s colleagues swore by its powers—and one or two of them had begun behaving erratically after prolonged use.

He wondered if the colonel’s shocking behavior back at Hikari could have been due to his overuse of these methamphetamine tablets.

Whatever the cause, a dangerous, almost manic side to the man had now been revealed.

The thought of pressing him about Noriko, in his current state, quickened Kan’s pulse and made him doubly anxious.

The plane continued northeast, staying low to reduce the risk of being spotted by enemy fighters from the aircraft carriers that were known to be only a short distance offshore.

Kan looked down at the green fields, the serene hills, the secluded valleys, so many places to hide.

Obtaining food would be the biggest problem.

But there would be fish in the rivers. And he had a little money…

The copilot appeared ninety minutes into the flight. “We can make it back to Tama!” he shouted to Colonel Sagara over the roar of the engines. He pointed toward the rear of the aircraft. “Tailwind!”

Sagara nodded his satisfaction. The copilot passed around a thermos, then headed back to the cockpit. Passing Kan and Yagi, he pointed to the window.

“Kobe!”

Kan pressed his face to the streaked glass, looking down as the obliterated port slipped astern and Osaka, second in size only to Tokyo, came into view. The entire southern half of the city, from the Yodo River to the port of Sakai, was a wasteland.

He glanced at Yagi, looking down beside him. There was anguish in the navy man’s face.

“Can you see your neighborhood?” he asked.

It took Yagi a moment to orient himself, picking out familiar landmarks. There was Osaka Station, the Castle, the ribbon of the Tokaido Main Line.

“On the south side of the river,” he said. “Near the fourth bridge.”

He scanned the desolation as the plane passed over but could not settle on where his home had stood.

It was down there somewhere in that square of brown, an empty lot now, the wooden structure and all the neighboring houses consumed in the flames back in March.

The small neighborhood park was gone too, treeless, devoid of all green.

So was the tofu shop on the corner he had walked by every morning, steam billowing out.

So was the produce vendor, the butcher shop, the bookseller, and everything else.

At least he could recognize Naniwasuji-dori.

He followed the main street along, burned-out buildings on both sides, to the approximate place where his father’s garage had once stood.

A letter from his sister had related how it burned on the same night as their home, and how their father had died fighting the flames.

Yagi had hated his father, who’d always been harsh with his discipline.

But he had wept bitter tears at the news just the same. If only the old bastard had—

The fifty-caliber bullets tore through the fuselage a half second before they heard the explosions.

Machine-gun fire. The Mitsubishi banked violently to the left, tumbling Kan across the compartment with Yagi and pinning them with Sagara against the opposite side.

They grabbed whatever they could and hung on as the plane took evasive action against whatever had just attacked them.

Kan, his eyes wide with terror, took in the four large holes in the walls of the aircraft, sky showing through.

There were two on one side near the ceiling, two opposite near the floor, each big enough for two fingers to fit through.

Whatever had swooped down on them had come from above.

The Mitsubishi took another wild lurch and started weaving back and forth, forcing Kan to hang on. Another burst of machine-gun fire closing in, followed by the scream of an engine and a flash outside the opposite window.

Yagi scrambled across the compartment to look out. “Hellcat!” he cried.

Kan stared at the new holes that had been punched through the skin of the aircraft, one of them close to the smaller stack of uranium rings.

He recalled a comment made by one of his Riken colleagues, an enthusiast on the subject, about the Hellcat being the deadliest fighter the Americans possessed.

The transport was flying low now, scarcely fifty meters up, skimming the trees.

There was no room for evasive action. They were defenseless and lumbering and pinned to the ground against a vastly more maneuverable enemy armed with two twenty-millimeter cannons and six machine guns.

The Hellcat would finish them on its next pass.

“Come on, you bastard!” roared Yagi, looking up through the window. He smacked the side of the plane. “Come and get me!”

Kan’s eyes met Sagara’s. The colonel stared back at him, hollow-eyed, frozen. They would all be dead in less than a minute, burned alive in a fireball as the Mitsubishi smashed into the trees. A portion of Kan’s brain registered a cough in one of the engines.

The transport lurched upward, barely clearing a hill. Another cough from the engine.

Yagi threw himself across the compartment to look out the opposite window. “Ha!” He wheeled about with a shining face. “He’s leaving!”

Sagara seemed to come back to life. He turned to the window to scan the skies overhead. Kan did the same. He saw the Hellcat climbing back up into the ether, rejoining a line of five other fighters, specks at one thousand meters. They were heading east, back out to sea.

“Returning to their carrier,” Sagara exulted over the engines. “Out of fuel! He must have been using up his ammunition!”

It took Kan a moment to process this information. When it finally sank in, he had a hard time prying his fingers from the handhold he had locked on to. He turned to Yagi with a weak smile of deliverance.

There was a tear in the petty officer’s shirt. A shard ripped from the fuselage by one of the bullets had scythed through the fabric.

“Your shirt,” Kan said, pointing.

Yagi glanced down with surprise. He examined his skin. No blood.

He stuck his fingers through the rip and grinned. “Look at that. Almost got me!”

The Mitsubishi limped on for another fifteen minutes, following the coast to land at the Army Air Force airfield at Hamamatsu.

The damage, a severed oil line and wrecked fuel pump, would take at least twenty-four hours to fix.

Colonel Sagara made hurried arrangements for the onward journey, then commandeered a private office and placed a call to the War Ministry and Colonel Takeshita.

“It’s done,” he reported. “I have it.”

“What’s happened down there?” Takeshita snapped back. He sounded harassed.

Sagara, caught up in his success, didn’t notice the tone. He cupped his hand around the mouthpiece. “We flew over the city. I saw it.”

“You saw it?”

“I saw it. Total destruction.”

Silence at the other end of the line. Then: “What are you talking about?”

“Hiro—”

Sagara stopped himself, realizing it had been only three hours. News about Hiroshima must not have reached Tokyo yet. Something else was troubling Colonel Takeshita.

“Pardon me, Takeshita-chūsa. Is there a problem?”

“Yes, there’s a problem! We’ve just received a protest from the Navy Chief of Staff that one of your men struck an officer of the Imperial Navy. A rifle butt in the head! Is that true?”