This poor fellow looked like a rack of bones. The butcher’s cat would have turned up its nose at him even before the Japs beat the crap out of him. Now he was all over bruises and blood, too. They’d broken his nose. A couple of guards held him upright. He didn’t seem able to stand on his own.
“What’ll they do to him?” Charlie Kaapu whispered to Peterson. He’d quickly mastered the art of speaking without moving his lips.
“Don’t know,” Peterson whispered back. “That’s why we’re here, though-so they can make a show.” It wasn’t much of a show. The guards let the POW fall to his knees. A lieutenant swung his sword. Peterson had heard that samurai swords would cut through anything on the first try. One more lie-or maybe the Jap hadn’t taken good care of the blade. Any which way, he needed three hacks before the POW’s head fell from his neck. The body convulsed, but not for long. The head just lay there. If anything, it seemed relieved the ordeal was over.
“Fuck,” Charlie Kaapu whispered. Under his swarthy skin, he turned green.
He was a civilian. He hadn’t seen so much. Peterson only shrugged. The Japs had done plenty worse. The lieutenant let out a torrent of Japanese. A noncom who spoke fragments of English pointed to the emaciated corpse and the pool of blood soaking into the ground under it. “You run, you-” He pointed again. That got the meaning across, but Peterson suspected some of the lieutenant’s eloquence was lost in translation. Yeah, like I give a shit, he thought.
Off in the distance, bombs burst and.50-caliber machine guns chattered: the unmistakable sounds of American planes giving the Japs hell. The guards resolutely pretended nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The POWs had to pretend the same thing. Men who grinned or laughed caught hell. Several of them had died from it-not as spectacularly as the beheaded man, but every bit as dead. The guards were jumpy, and getting jumpier all the time, no matter what they pretended.
The sergeant with a little English pointed toward the mouth of the tunnel through the Koolau Range. “You go!” he yelled, and the POWs went.
It was madness. Peterson knew it. Everybody knew it, prisoners and guards alike. The only reason the men were digging through the mountains’ bowels was so they could die from hard labor and bad food. Too many of them hadn’t needed any further abuse from the Japs. The routine was deadly enough.
Besides that, even if there had been some point to all the man-killing labor, there wasn’t any more. The Japanese would never get a nickel’s worth of good out of the tunnel. By every sign Peterson could use to judge, they wouldn’t hold Oahu. The Stars and Stripes would fly here again. Everything the POWs in the Kalihi Valley did was an exercise in futility.
They got driven to it even so. If anything, they got driven harder than ever now. The guards might have feared they would rise up if they weren’t worked to death and otherwise intimidated. They might have been right, too.
Outside the tunnel mouth, Peterson grabbed a pick. Charlie Kaapu took a shovel. His face said he would sooner have bashed Japs with it than lifted chunks of rock. “Easy,” Peterson murmured. A machine-gun nest covered the tools. Anybody who got out of line would die fast. So would a lot of POWs who hadn’t done one damn thing.
The hapa-Hawaiian growled, down deep in his throat. But he carried the shovel into the tunnel instead of braining the nearest guard. Light vanished. It would have been dark in there even if Peterson had been well nourished. Night blindness had advanced with his beriberi. He couldn’t see much at all.
Lamps set into the wall here and there gave just enough light to let him keep moving forward. The sound of other POWs banging away at the living rock told him he was getting close. So did a Jap’s yelclass="underline" “Hurry up! Faster!”
Peterson wanted to ask why. The Jap would have answered with a beating or a bayonet or a bullet. Those answers were persuasive enough, too. How could you argue with them? You couldn’t, not unless you had a club or a rifle yourself. Peterson wished for a rifle. He wished for a machine gun, and the strength to fire it from the hip. You could do that in the movies. In the real world? He knew better.
A Jap hit him with a bamboo swagger stick for no reason he could see. A pick was a weapon, too. He could have broken the bastard’s head. He could have, but he didn’t. He didn’t fear death himself, though he would surely die if he raised his hand to a guard. But the Japs would slaughter untold other POWs to avenge and punish. He didn’t want to die with that on his conscience.
Instead of smashing the guard’s skull, the pick bit into the rock. Pulling it free took all his strength. So did lifting it for the next stroke. How many had he made? Too many. Far too many. That was all he knew.
He grubbed rock out of the wall. Charlie Kaapu shoveled it up and dumped it into baskets. Some other poor, sorry son of a bitch carried away the spoil. Other POWs grubbed and shoveled and carried, too. The guards screamed at everybody to move faster. Dully, Peterson wondered what difference it could make. They weren’t that close to punching through, or he didn’t think they were. Even if they had been, what advantage could the Japs gain from moving men to the east coast? No fighting there. Could they get back over the mountains and hit the Americans in the flank? They’d done it in the west in their invasion, but they’d been up against a much weaker foe, and one who didn’t control the air. Peterson didn’t believe they could make it matter this time around.
Every so often, one of the laborers keeled over. The guards weren’t about to put up with that-it was too much like resting on the job. They fell on the sufferers like wolves, trying to get them back on their feet with blows and kicks. Some of the POWs could be bullied upright again. Some were too far gone, and lay on the tunnel floor no matter what the Japs did. And some didn’t keel over because they were tired. Some keeled over because they were dead.
The men who carried away rock also carried away corpses. That gummed up the works, because the rock accumulated. The Japs just screamed at them to move faster, too, and beat them when they didn’t-SOP for Imperial Japan.
Hours blurred together into one long agony. At last, after the usual eternity, the guards let the POWs stumble out of the tunnel. They queued up for the little bit of rice the Japs grudgingly doled out. There was even less than usual today. Men grumbled-food they took seriously. The Japs only shrugged. One who spoke a little English said, “More not come. Blame Americans.”
Had U.S. fighters (some of the ones Peterson had seen weren’t Wildcats, but new, plainly hot machines) shot up the rice on the way to the Kalihi Valley? Or had the Japs, with more important things to worry about than a bunch of damned-literally-POWs, just not bothered sending any? Either way, it made starving to death seem almost worthwhile.
Almost.
WHEN JIRO TAKAHASHI WALKED UP NUUANU AVENUE to the Japanese consulate, he was shocked not to see the Rising Sun flying in front of the compound. Then he noticed how many bullet holes pocked the buildings. The staff must have decided not to fly the flag to keep from giving a target to the American planes now constantly overhead.
For most of the occupation, the guards in front of the consulate had been a ceremonial force. No more. They crouched in sandbagged machine-gun nests, the snouts of their weapons pointing up toward the sky. There were fewer of them than there had been. Some, Jiro supposed, would have gone up to the front. Others… With the buildings as battered as they were, some of those bullets would have found flesh, too.
“It’s the Fisherman!” one of the guards called. The men who were left still knew Jiro. That made him feel good. The one who’d spoken went on, “You bring us some nice ahi, Fisherman, or even some mackerel?”
Jiro laughed nervously. He was emptyhanded, as they could see. “Not today, gomen nasai,” he answered. He was sorry, too; in better times, he would have had fish for the consul and the chancellor and often the guards as well. “Is Kita-san in?” he asked.