Page 51 of Daikon
TWENTY-EIGHT
“HELLO? IS THAT YOU?”
It was Noriko’s voice on the other end of the line. A jolt of shock passed through Keizo Kan, followed by a wave of relief and emotion. He had placed the call to the Riken expecting to be disappointed again, suspecting that Colonel Sagara had been lying, that Noriko had not been released.
He mastered himself and cast a nervous look around. The clerk was the only one in the office. He was at his desk, head down, preoccupied with his work.
“Noriko?” he said, holding his damaged hand over the mouthpiece.
“Yes. I’m here.” Her voice was weak. He could scarcely hear her.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you—are you safe?”
A pause before she replied. “Yes, I think so. Where are you?”
Kan’s eyes darted to the window, scanning for trouble, then back to the clerk. The young man’s head was still down.
“I can’t say,” he whispered.
Kan had not asked Captain Onda for permission to make the call.
He was sure he would receive another refusal.
He had gone to the headquarters building on his own, found a quiet office with a telephone on the wall, and told the young clerk in an imperious tone that he needed to use it.
The clerk, recognizing him as the older civilian on the Renzan’s no-return crew and no doubt important, ushered him to the unit and returned to his desk.
“When will you return?” Noriko asked, breaking the silence.
“I don’t know.” Kan’s mind was racing. Everything had just changed.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Husband… I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Kan replied, beset by another wave of emotion. “Everything is all right.”
Escape. That was what he needed to focus on now. If Noriko was free, Colonel Sagara could no longer use her to control him. That meant he could escape now. He could slip away from the airfield after dark, like PO Yagi suggested.
“Hello? Are you there?” Noriko asked.
“Yes, I’m here. Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“No one is listening?”
“No. They’re outside.” Noriko was whispering now, too.
“We have to leave,” said Kan.
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“We just have to leave.”
Kan racked his brain trying to think of a plan. He would meet Noriko… where?
“Keizo…”
At what time? If he escaped tonight, when would he reach Tokyo?
“Keizo,” he heard her repeat. “The war is ending.”
Kan’s eyes went back to the window, watching for trouble. “What do you mean?”
“I have a leaflet. The government has said they’re going to surrender.”
Kan stood still, confused. He was so focused on his vision of getting away that it was difficult to turn from it and absorb what Noriko had just said. So it was true. It was more than true. Actual steps had been taken to surrender.
“Do you have the paper?” he said, looking out the window. There was someone out there, someone coming this way.
“Yes.”
“Read it to me.”
Noriko began reading the leaflet: “?‘The Japanese government, acting on the wishes of the Emperor of Japan, has informed the Allied powers of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China that it wishes to end hostilities and bring the war to an end. Below is the full text of the message we received…’?”
Kan listened with his eyes locked on the approaching figure. It was Captain Onda, heading toward the headquarters building.
Onda passed out of view, making for the main entrance.
“I have to go now,” Kan whispered, interrupting Noriko before she had finished.
“Keizo—”
Kan hung up the phone.
“Thank you,” he said to the clerk. He moved toward the door, expecting Onda to burst in.
He reached the door and looked out. The hallway was empty. Onda must have gone to the base commander’s office.
Kan stepped into the hallway and headed for the exit at the opposite end of the building. He was too agitated to think clearly. He started walking, not really aware of where he was going, past warehouses and the training school buildings, past the mess hall, past the barracks.
He came to the main gate, the most direct way to the road leading to Tokyo. As an escape route, this was of course out of the question. There was a guard post here, a fence extending in both directions, and houses nearby—houses occupied by people who would see him even if he got past the sentries.
He headed toward the north end of the runway, walking along the perimeter fence as if taking an afternoon stroll.
The northwest corner of the airfield, beyond the scattering of buildings, was overseen by a single guard post—an unmanned guard post, Kan discovered as he drew nearer.
No one was in sight. The fence was rusting to pieces.
He would leave after nightfall. With the airfield in darkness, total blackout conditions, no one would see him.
Once beyond the airfield, he would make his way to the Riken and meet Noriko and together they would disappear.
Where would they go? He hadn’t worked that out yet.
For how long? Only a short while, if the government truly was making moves to surrender.
It was hard to imagine that the war could end without Japan’s total destruction, but between what Colonel Sagara had said and the information on the leaflet, Kan now believed it.
The war was going to end, and soon. What would he and Noriko do after that? He had no idea.
He reached the northeast corner of the airfield and continued to follow the fence down the east side. It opened onto the firing range where the Renzan had been towed to test its guns. The place appeared deserted, just as Yagi had said.
Kan looked back at the runway and the hangars and buildings beyond it. He had walked not much more than a kilometer, at a moderate pace, but it had left him breathing hard.
No one was watching. He was alone.
He entered the firing range, passing between the earthen berms rising to a height of three meters. Another berm straight ahead showed signs of recent firing, Yagi’s and Otani’s handiwork with the guns, but everywhere else was thickly covered with grass.
Kan continued on past it, screened now from view from the airfield. A little farther on and he came to the far side of the range—unfenced, unguarded, open scrubland beyond.
He had just escaped. He didn’t need to wait until dark. He could keep walking and be halfway to Tokyo by nightfall.
He stood there, looking eastward, gazing at freedom. There was a dirt track off to the right, heading away from the airfield in the direction of the capital. No one was on it. No one was about.
Yagi’s words sounded inside his head: Onda can take off without you. Why should you go?
He didn’t move. He knew that he couldn’t.
If he escaped now, the mission to San Francisco would go ahead without him just the same, and if successful, it would wipe out a whole city.
He would have helped to destroy a whole city, a city of people, women and children, a city transformed into a hellscape like he had seen at Hiroshima.
Was his hatred of America so great that it could support such a burden?
And then there would be what would happen to Japan.
The destruction of San Francisco would surely derail the move toward surrender.
It would embolden the hard-liners in the Army to fight on and prompt the Americans to exact a terrible revenge.
Complete annihilation would be the only possible outcome.
If he escaped now, he would be sacrificing all of Japan to save his own skin.
The work of repairing the Renzan bomber and preparing it for its new mission had continued around the clock and was now almost complete.
A heap of metal, mostly armor plating, lay on the floor of the hangar, a reduction in weight of more than two tons.
The replacement Homare engine was installed, mechanics making final connections.
The severed rudder cable was replaced and the blown wheel repaired.
The bullet holes were patched up, squares of unpainted metal on black.
And the tail gunner’s compartment had been stripped bare.
Twenty-millimeter gun, belts of ammunition, ammo racks and gunner’s seat—it had all been removed, a savings in weight equivalent to 300 liters of gas.
Kan found PO Yagi taking a cigarette break at the back of the hangar.
“Could you make the call?” Yagi asked, looking up through his smoke. He was stretched out on the floor, a piece of wood for his pillow.
Kan nodded. He motioned toward the office against the back wall. Yagi got up and followed.
“The war is ending,” Kan whispered, closing the door. “The Americans are dropping leaflets on Tokyo. The government has accepted the terms of surrender.”
“Leaflets,” Yagi dismissively snorted. “Enemy propaganda. It’s just a lie.”
“No, I don’t think so. It had the actual communications printed on it, the government’s message to the Allies. My wife read it to me over the phone. The war is ending.”
Consternation came into Yagi’s face as he puffed on his cigarette.
Kan could imagine what he was feeling. There was not supposed to be a future beyond the Final Battle, the titanic clash that would occur when the Americans began their invasion of Kyushu.
It was Japan’s inescapable fate. There was no room for hope.
“If your wife is free,” said Yagi, “you can leave. You don’t need to go on the mission.”
Kan looked toward the closed door, the Renzan bomber outside.
“I can’t.”
“Let them go!” Yagi hissed. “They can kill themselves just as well without you.”
“But if they’re successful, if they attack San Francisco—”
“Let them! The Americans deserve it! How many of our cities have they destroyed? Fifty? Sixty?”
Kan let out a weary sigh, rubbing his forehead, which was starting to ache.
He had never revealed his thoughts on the war to anyone apart from Noriko, and even that had been just a few whispers.
They were dangerous thoughts, illegal thoughts, thoughts that could get him arrested and thrown into prison.
He looked at Yagi. Could he trust this man with what he was about to say?
“In my last year in America,” he began, “my professor arranged for me to take the train from San Francisco to Chicago, to attend a conference at the university there. He said it would be a chance for me to see how big the United States was. I think he wanted to impress me. It was three thousand kilometers. City after city. Factory after factory. Fields of grain extending all the way to the horizon. Endless resources. And when I reached Chicago, there was still more than a thousand kilometers to go to New York—a thousand kilometers more of factories, America’s industrial heartland.
“So when I heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor…”
Kan glanced at the closed door. He leaned closer to Yagi and lowered his voice.
“When I heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, I knew in my heart it was a disaster. There was no way we could beat them. But we all cheered. I cheered! I convinced myself for nearly three years that we deserved an empire, that we could somehow build a new world. And look what it’s got us.
We’re getting ground into dust. Or we give up and save the little that’s left and try to start over.
“But Colonel Sagara won’t allow that. Remember what he said before we took off, about how we were also fighting enemies in the highest levels of our own government who were trying to surrender?
This is his plan. He wants this attack on San Francisco not just to hurt the Americans.
He wants it to stop any move to surrender so that the war will continue, so that we keep fighting until all of Japan is burned up and every American he can take with him is dead, until everyone and everything has been sacrificed for his honor.
And we keep going along, doing as we’re told, following orders, pretending that—” Kan’s voice started to break.
“Pretending that losing people we love doesn’t hurt us, that it serves some sort of purpose. ”
He looked at Yagi with tears in his eyes. “Why do we allow ourselves to be treated this way?”
Yagi gazed back, a hard look, appraising. And Kan began to think he had just made a mistake.
“So what are you proposing?” said Yagi at last. “To go along and detonate that thing over the ocean? Like you already tried to do?”
Kan didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands.
“Because if that’s what you’re thinking,” Yagi continued, “I’d say you were a fool.”
Kan heard the navy man draw in a last lungful of smoke, the dry tobacco emitting a crackle. The sounds of the stub being ground into the ashtray. The squeak of the chair as he leaned back. Then the familiar sound:
“ Humph .”
Kan looked up.
Yagi was smiling. “You know, it would make me sad to see you do that, Sensei. I don’t have any friends left.”
Their eyes met. And Kan knew that Yagi wouldn’t betray him.
“What if there was another way?” he whispered.
Yagi’s eyes narrowed. “There’s often another way,” he said.
Kan silently read the navy man’s face for a moment. Then he took the plunge:
“I’ve been thinking of sabotaging the Daikon.”
Yagi slowly nodded.
“If I could make some sort of timer,” Kan said, caution falling away. “But a clock… how do I set it? I don’t know when Onda will take off. I don’t know when the plane will be out at sea.”
He looked over at the shelves lining the wall, cluttered with gauges and small parts and miscellaneous bits of equipment.
“If there was some way to use barometric pressure,” he said. He went to the shelf and began sorting through the detritus of dozens of aircraft. “The plane will be flying very high…”
Yagi’s eyes were on the ashtray. He considered it for a moment.
“What about temperature?” he said.