Page 5 of Daikon

“Policeman!” he called out to Kinoshita, looking on from the track. “No one is to touch this.”

Kinoshita jerked his head in acknowledgment. “Hai!”

Yagi began to descend the hillside on the other side of the cockpit, handing himself down from one tree to the next.

It was then that he noticed the scraped and muddied image of a nearly naked woman painted on the aircraft’s aluminum skin.

He broke off an obscuring branch to reveal the picture more fully.

An American movie star, displaying her bottom and looking alluringly over her shoulder.

The picture was framed by two words, painted in red at a jaunty angle.

He took out his notebook and copied down the twelve letters without understanding: WICKED INTENT .

“It’s just over here,” said Kinoshita when Yagi rejoined him. The policeman ushered him along the track for another fifty meters, toward a trio of farmers squatting on the side of the embankment, contemplating something below them down in the field.

“There,” said Kinoshita, pointing toward whatever it was they were gazing at.

“You should move back!” Yagi called out to the farmers as he approached. “Move back at least one hundred—”

He looked down at the biggest bomb he had ever seen in his life.

“Get out of here,” he said quietly. “Move.”

The farmers scrambled to their feet and scurried away.

The bomb lay at the edge of the field, its nose buried in the chest-high embankment.

It must have tumbled some distance, expending momentum, Yagi deduced.

Otherwise it would have dug itself all the way into the earth.

It was some seventy-five centimeters across, and three meters of its length was showing.

Depending on how much of it was buried, it was possibly the length of two men.

“Only this one?” he said.

Kinoshita nervously nodded. “Only this one. Should I… should I guard the site?”

Yagi grunted and nodded. “Make sure that nothing is touched.”

“Hai!” Kinoshita gratefully backed away, then turned and jogged off.

Yagi continued contemplating the bomb. For a B-29 to be carrying only one, and so large—it must be special.

He eased himself down the embankment to stand in the paddy among the rice plants.

The realization that the bomb had tumbled violently before coming to rest was not a great comfort.

It could have some sort of delayed fuze, after all.

He stood very still, apprehensive before it, like it was a sleeping beast that might suddenly wake.

It was making no noise. He stepped closer and lowered his head toward the dirt-smeared black casing.

Nothing.

He pressed his ear to the metal, listening for the ticking of a timing device, the sound of an internal mechanism winding itself down.

Nothing.

He straightened up, starting to relax, and once again took in the immensity of the thing.

He now noticed that under the dirt it was covered with inscriptions in chalk and white paint, each put there by a different hand, judging from the various ways the letters were formed—some in capitals, some cursive, some slanted, some straight.

He had a passing knowledge of the English alphabet and recognized some of the letters: an E and an M and a P.

He did not understand any of the words but could guess the intent.

But for so many inscriptions to be on one bomb…

Yes, it was clearly special, worth investigating. He decided not to use the thermite charges they had brought along to detonate it in place.

A sharp intake of breath from Nakamura and Wada, returning at the double and getting their first look at the thing.

They descended the embankment, stepping lightly. Yagi began brushing dirt from the casing, revealing what appeared to be a large identifying number, L10, and more handwritten inscriptions.

“These look like signatures,” said Nakamura, scrutinizing the various scrawls. He sounded out a few of the more legible names, pointing at them in turn: “John Morris… Samuel Filson… Edward Houseman, for Charlie.” To all three men they were meaningless sounds.

Nakamura moved on to the largest inscription, printed in block letters, and read it aloud in halting English: “For… the boys… on… Han-cock Street… De-tro-it… USA.” He puzzled over this for a moment, murmuring the Japanese word for “boys.”

“A street of boys,” mused Wada, looking over his shoulder.

“Detroit,” said Yagi. “That’s an American city.” He remembered his father mentioning the place. Yagi senior had owned a garage in Osaka and often had occasion to service American cars, Fords and Packards and even a Cadillac that had been built in Detroit.

Steeling himself, Nakamura brushed off the dirt from another inscription and slowly read it aloud, syllable by syllable. “?‘To Emperor Hirohito, Special Delivery to where the sun don’t shine.’?”

He looked up at Yagi, pointing at the name. “?‘Emperor Hirohito.’ That means Tennō Heika.”

Yagi tried the rest of the inscription. “?‘Where… the… sun… don’t… shine.’?”

Nakamura attempted a translation.

Wada’s eyes widened. “They’re cursing the Emperor to a place of darkness. Near a street of boys. What could that mean?”

Yagi sent the two men back to the bicycles for the tool bag and shovels and put them to work excavating dirt from around the bomb.

As they dug and sweated, he jotted down notes and began making a sketch.

He then took over with the hand brush, cleaning off the last of the dirt from the now fully exposed bomb and beginning a detailed examination.

It seemed sensible to gather as much information as he could, given the bomb’s unusual nature.

He also hadn’t figured out how to go about disarming it.

He in fact had very little experience in bomb disposal.

What he knew came from a daylong lecture that had been part of his retraining at Kure Naval Yard after recovering from his burns.

The class had been shown a 50-kilo American incendiary bomb and a few examples of British bombs recovered earlier in the war.

That was the extent of the enemy ordnance he had seen.

The bomb was just over 3 meters long from its blunt nose to the boxlike structure at the tail.

Yagi added the measurement to his sketch, together with the diameter, 71 centimeters, and the circumference, 2.

23 meters. The rear structure had been crushed on impact, but its original configuration was apparent, crisscrossed vanes to stabilize the bomb as it fell.

It was bolted to the casing and evidently could be removed.

Some sort of plate lay beneath it, an access plate to the rear of the bomb.

There were three shallow holes in it, possibly for a special tool to assist with removal.

Yagi worked his way forward, running his hand along the casing.

He came to a vertical seam in the metal, lined with bolts.

A second seam lay another meter and a half farther on, making for three distinct parts to the casing.

And positioned on this forward seam: a single steel shackle.

This was where the bomb was suspended and thus marked its center of gravity.

It was only a third of the way from the nose. That meant it was nose-heavy.

Where was the fuze? On the American incendiary bomb he had seen at Kure, it was inserted in the nose. Seeing the bolt and nut projecting from the front of this vastly larger weapon led him to think that it was similarly designed.

He removed the largest adjustable wrench from the tool bag and fitted it onto the nut projecting from the nose. He began to apply pressure as Nakamura and Wada looked on.

The nut didn’t move.

Yagi braced himself and tried again, straining harder.

The nut didn’t move.

He got down close to squint at the fraction of bolt projecting from the end of the nut. He could make out a bit of the thread, enough to verify that he was applying torque in the proper direction. Counterclockwise. The Americans did things the same, like on their cars.

He wavered, thinking he ought to switch his attention to the tail. No, the box-shaped vanes there would first need to be cut away. And that couldn’t be done here in a rice field without an acetylene torch.

He returned to the nose.

He removed the heavy hammer from the tool bag, repositioned the wrench, and tapped on the handle to loosen the nut.

It remained frozen. He increased the force of his blows, then tried tapping the wrench in one direction, then the other, trying to break whatever bond was preventing the nut from turning.

No good. The nut wouldn’t budge. Yagi let out a sigh of frustration and settled back on his haunches.

It was only then that he noticed Nakamura and Wada hovering behind him, their eyes wide with alarm from watching him use a hammer on a bomb.

Their fright goaded him on. It had been this way with him since he was a boy, when his family emigrated from Korea and his father, Yang Jae-sok, had adopted the Japanese surname Yagi.

As an ethnic Korean in Japan, fully acculturated but still looked down on, Ryohei Yagi had developed a drive growing up to prove that he was braver and stronger and tougher than any Japanese boy.

It was a trait that got him into numerous fights at school.

By the age of sixteen, he could take on grown men.

“I hope you sent a letter home to your parents,” he said, squaring his powerful shoulders and returning to work. He readjusted the wrench on the nut and bellied up close, both his hands bearing down on the handle. Wada, seeing what he was about to do, sucked in his breath.

“ Yosh! ”

Yagi brought his weight down on the wrench, one, two, three, four times. The nut held like it was welded in place. Instead, the entire bomb moved.

He paused to wipe away the sweat dripping into his eyes. A glance at Nakamura and Wada, looking on in terror.

“You two boys want to give it a try?”

Both men shook their heads.

Yagi got into position again to use his full weight on the wrench. He began heaving down again on the handle, grunting with effort. The bomb began rocking. Finally he felt the nut give way.

He paused for a breath, then resumed.

More movement. A definite turn.

But it wasn’t the nut that was turning. It was the whole steel disk to which the nut was attached. It was unscrewing from the nose of the bomb like a giant oil drain plug from the crankcase of an engine.

Using less force, Yagi completed a full turn.

The plate was a centimeter out now and rotating smoothly.

Another turn and another, and the plug kept coming.

Five centimeters, then eight, then ten—ten centimeters of high-quality steel with machined threads cut into the surface.

Whatever this was—and it didn’t look at all like a fuze—it had been manufactured with care.

It was getting hard to turn now. The emerging plug, solid steel, was heavy.

“Take the weight off the end,” Yagi ordered.

Wada and Nakamura, moving stiffly from fright, positioned themselves facing the nose of the bomb and lifted up on the plug as Yagi continued to unscrew it.

A heavy metallic thunk, and the bomb shifted. The two seamen threw themselves backward. The plug had come loose. It was hanging at an angle from what was now a hole in the bomb’s nose, apparently held in place by something farther inside.

With a great deal of struggle and straining, PO Yagi and his two assistants pulled the plug the rest of the way out of the cavity. It dropped into the dirt and they fell back, panting, Yagi’s vision momentarily filled with flashing stars brought on by the effort.

Retrieving a flashlight from the tool bag, he peered into the exposed nose of the bomb. A polished tube, like a gun barrel, extended deep inside, sixteen centimeters in diameter and easily two meters in length. If there was any explosive material inside, he couldn’t see it.

He got to his feet and looked down at the heavy plug they had removed from the nose.

This was no fuze. It was a cylindrical assembly of several pieces of metal, held together by a thick rod with a heavy nut on each end.

At the outermost end was the threaded plug that he had unscrewed from the casing.

Next to it, in the center of the assembly, was a smaller piece of machined steel, angling down to a diameter of fifteen centimeters, then a thick gray metallic disk that had the look of coarse iron or perhaps tungsten carbide. And seated upon this, farthest inside…

There were six metallic rings, stacked one on top of the other.

They were of varying thicknesses and crudely cast, which seemed odd, considering the precision evident in the rest of the bomb.

The metal itself also seemed strange. It had a plum-colored patina, richer on some of the rings than others, and was quite soft, like lead.

It yielded when Yagi pressed it with his thumbnail.

It was also extremely heavy. After removing the stacked rings from the assembly by unscrewing the innermost bolt from the rod, Yagi needed a good deal of strength to pick them up. The entire stack was only the size of a one-liter tin can, but he estimated that it weighed about twenty-five kilos.

He allowed his two men to handle the rings as they wondered what the material was.

It was Seaman Nakamura, remembering his high school chemistry, who suggested conducting a test.