Dragon of the Mangrooves (18 page)

The crocodile must have known the cow was approaching, and had been pre-cisely aiming at that animal. Otherwise, it couldn’t have overlooked the herd of prey straying stupidly into its territorial water. It was pure luck that they were all still alive.

After some time, each soldier stood up and timidly approached the creek, holding his gun at the ready. There were no remnants of the grisly event that had just occurred. All they saw was the dark water flowing slowly.

The sun set into the ridge of Hill 509, where the decisive battle had unfolded between the Twenty-sixth Indian Division and Ramree Garrison. Sumi let his party go through the wetlands, as soon as he made sure the sky was clear of enemy planes.

They had used the darkness to hide themselves from enemy eyes until then.

Now they all realized the same darkness was also keeping the uncanny carnivore lurking in ambush mode to catch a prey out of their sight. Sumi felt the surroundings were dangerous since he had seen the crocodile up close. He called Pondgi from the rear and asked him what he knew about crocodiles.

Pondgi told him a crocodile was a cold-blooded animal who disliked sudden changes of its body temperature. So it often laid in water at night and moved around, regardless of sheer darkness, because it was nocturnal. Therefore, it was especially dangerous to approach any waterside at night, Pondgi said.

Sumi knew that for the rest of the night, they couldn’t avoid the waterside. All members of the rescue party kept away from creeks as much as possible upon restarting the march. When they had no option but to cross, all their attention was focused upon it. They entered a creek one man at a time, while the others kept a close watch with their forefingers on the triggers, lest a crocodile should go at him at any moment.

Pondgi said the crocodile’s scaly back skin was so hard that it might resist pistol bullets. It was even doubtful if the Sten gun, having shown its potency at the encounter with the British, would be effective against a crocodile, to say nothing of Sumi’s Nambu fourteen. The only thing they could rely on was their rifle’s slightly better piercing ability.

Pondgi added that the eyes of crocodiles glow at night like cats’ eyes. Sumi searched over all the water surface with his one precious flashlight each time they entered water. A croc’s retinas apparently reflect incoming light and appear to glow red. If he turned the flashlight on near enemies, he would run the risk of being spotted easily. It might be suicide.

But the rows of sharp-pointed teeth seen earlier were more frightening than enemy bullets, so it seemed rather reasonable to search with a flashlight, despite the risk.

They made their way nervously across creeks, one after another, and came across a small settlement surrounded by tiny dry paddies. Roofs thatched by the leaves of nipa palm loomed in the darkness.

Sumi felt confident that it was Yanthitgyi, for he had checked it on his map many times during the journey. They had gotten to their destination. The time was well past midnight. He found the silhouette of a mountain that looked like Hill 604 in the northwestern night sky and felt strong.

Its folds were so intricate that even mountain guns couldn’t shell that hill easily. It was highly probable that the garrison had reset its position somewhere in that hill.

He heard no roar of cannons after sunset. It was likely that neither army had completed the build-up of troops yet. Sumi thought he could outwit any enemies who were busy assembling if he could find the garrison and evacuate it before the enemies resumed an offensive.

But a violent burst rose from an unexpected direction. It came from the east, the direction of Myinkhon Creek. Sumi thought it a mortar shell. It was incessant and showed no sign of stopping. This shelling was serious. No doubt it was from the enemy, because their friends couldn’t have such quantities of ammo now. The enemy was stamping out the Japanese. Considerable numbers of soldiers who had failed to cross the creek the night before probably roamed around adjacent mangroves and caught the fire helplessly.

Sumi immediately sent his troops to Myinkhon Creek. He had to get in touch with the friends, who were now under fire, to evacuate them somewhere safe as soon as possible. The enemy was so close now that he heard the discharging sound—like a high-pitched drumbeat—rising among the consecutive explosions.

Sumi saw the muzzle fires and promptly located the position of the enemy. An artillery unit of about three or four mortars was deployed around the dry paddy in front of him. Lit by star shells launched one after another, the crown of the mangrove was almost shining. The massive dose of flares led him to surmise that the enemy probably hadn’t located the Japanese position yet. Was it a reconnaissance in force, or an effort at intimidation? Had the friends hiding themselves in mangroves aroused the enemy somehow? He was seized by a complicated emotion, a mixture of expectation and impatience.

The rescue party went around the rear of the enemy position and plunged into the mangrove on the right. They pushed their way through the dense woods. Like the enemy, they didn’t know their friends’ position. They needed to get a wider view.

All of a sudden, a shell exploded just fifty meters ahead of Sumi, and he saw black shadows of branches and twigs ripped away by the blast dancing in the air.

He and his men hit the dirt. Sumi was terrified, expecting the next shell to come at any moment. But it didn’t come. The shot they had nearly caught might have been the last; the pounding seemed to have stopped at last.

Soon after they resumed rushing through the woods, their range of vision widened. Then a pitch-black waterway burst into view; it was Myinkhon Creek. If it was daytime, they would have been able to see the Burmese mainland far on the opposite bank, but now it was just endless darkness.

They found a thicket jutted out into the creek and plunged into it. Saltwater lapped against their shins. From the thicket, Sumi could look in both directions along the edge. He prudently hid himself behind one of tree trunks and resolutely commanded the others while keeping his attention on anything unnatural.

“They must be around here. Now divide up and search for them!” Sumi commanded the troops.

A star shell abruptly went up behind them again before he finished the last word. A dazzling luminosity almost like daylight shone all around, and dyed the foliage in a lively green. Sumi immediately took advantage of this opportunity to view his surroundings.

And he saw something he didn’t expect.

It was a large cluster of countless little lights floating on the surface—many pairs of red lights spread along the water’s edge. Though most drifted the creek slowly to the left, some didn’t move at all—near the rim of the very thicket where the rescue party hid, as if they were laying siege to it. Just when Sumi realized what those lights were, Pondgi sharply alerted him from behind. “Master Sumi. Watch out! Crocodiles are aiming at us!”

In a moment, the memory of the earlier horrific event returned to Sumi’s mind. He cowered on the spot, almost instinctively.

The star shell was burning itself out. Darkness began to reign over the creek again, and the cluster of lights encircling the thicket was also melting away into the dark surface. Sumi managed to suppress the fear welling up and shouted a command: “Prepare to fire!”

A series of sharp metallic sounds of cocking and releasing safety latches was heard in the darkness.

“Here is dangerous. Draw back by ten meters. Get away from the water! But don’t move quickly!” Pondgi said from somewhere behind.

Every soldier began pulling back with his gun at the ready.

What they were up against them now was no human. Any jerky motions might evoke an attack. Everybody moved slowly, like a Noh actor. Sumi was barely able to bear the fear that those white, triangular jaws might break through the darkness and come at him at any moment. He managed to tread on soggy mud before being carried away by the impulse to scream, when a crack of gunfire pealed out from inside the woods on their left. It continued by ones and twos. He could clearly see its muzzle flash in the deep, dark mangrove. It wasn’t further than two hundred meters, or even less.

Pointing in the direction of the gunfire, Morioka said, “It’s the fire of a model thirty-eight infantry rifle, Lieutenant!”

Others also shouted. “Yeah, no doubt! That sound is exactly the same as our rifles.”

“The friendly troop is firing now!”

“We’ve found them at last!”

This firing of rifles awakened their excitement. Yoshitake’s voice was trembling, like he was unable to restrain his emotion. “It’s really worth wading across all the way here. Let’s go and guide them to the south paddy, Lieutenant.”

“Wait! Don’t get flustered. Remember the enemy is around,” Sumi said, holding his rash subordinates with a stifling snap.

The sporadic firing of model thirty-eights didn’t cease, but he didn’t detect even the slightest hint of hostile return fire. If they fired even one shot at the dominating enemy, then there would be the devil to pay. Something was strange.

If they weren’t engaged in a gunfight, what were they shooting at?

Then Sumi heard a weird sound. Mixed with the reports of rifles, a strange shriek, like that of a monkey, came up from the mangrove where they had just witnessed the muzzle fire flashing. But it was obviously different from the monkey jabber they had heard many other times in jungles.

Suddenly every piece of the puzzle linked up in his brain, and he felt like his blood had frozen. He was listening to the screams of men. Then Sumi heard Pondgi mutter quietly, as if he shared the appalling conclusion: “Crocodiles are eating Japanese soldiers.”

Superior Private Minoru Kasuga came back to his old foxhole on the morning of February 17, after he and his colleagues had stopped the search for First Lieutenant Kishimoto. He dawdled a whole day there. The HQ staff confirmed the mess kit and the boot as Kishimoto’s equipment. Sergeant Keiichi Tomita apparently had reported his death to the battalion HQ as KIA, as planned. No one mentioned crocodiles after that.

Then an orderly came from the HQ at daybreak of February 18 and notified them that the escape operation would be put in action that midnight, and that everyone should prepare one or two bamboo poles of about two and a half meters length. The instruction ordered each soldier to fill up the hollows of the stem with 2.7 liters of drinking water. They would be forced to swim across Myinkhon Creek by using the bamboo as makeshift buoys. This was ancient enough to remind some of the Warring States period, when armored feudal lords competed for dominance in the sixteenth century. Tomita was infuriated to hear the way-too-primitive plan being called an operation and bawled out the orderly. But once the order had been announced, they had nothing to do but to obey it.

Kasuga had been cutting the bamboo at the foot of Hill 604 when he heard of the death of Second Lieutenant Jinno. A soldier from Machine Gun Company HQ, shifting from Saikpya Village, told him. According to the soldier, Saikpya had suffered an air strike while Tomita Squad had searched for First Lieutenant Kishimoto two days before. The bombing had destroyed all the precious sampan that MG Company HQ had independently maintained to carry the severely injured men. And an automatic cannon had blown off Jinno’s right leg. Jinno must have thought nothing could be done to save him, because reportedly he had entered a nearby mountain alone and killed himself with a grenade.

The soldier told him Jinno’s words to everyone before his death: “I’ve dispatched Sergeant Tomita and his men to Yanthitgyi to study the escape route there. Be sure to pick them up before the creek-crossing operation and take them to the continent. Don’t leave my men in this damned island. Not even one!”

Kasuga was surprised. It was the first and last consideration for his subordinates shown by their platoon commander, whose life until then had been filled with self-protection and deviousness. Kasuga stopped sawing for a while, feeling compassion for his commander. Jinno probably knew his company had lost all the sampan to ferry him. Otherwise, Jinno might have tried to run away to Taungup, even on one leg. The decision to commit suicide couldn’t have been easy.

Kasuga now realized the difficult situation they faced.

Just as Tomita or Jinno had forecasted, the withdrawal seemed to begin from Yanthitgyi. Soldiers were coming from every corner of the island into the surrounding hills, one after another. Unlike Kasuga and others, the soldiers coming there were quite unfamiliar with the geography. When they got a order to bring bamboo, they didn’t know where to find one. Some of them entered the nearby settlements at their own initiative, battered down private houses, and even plundered bamboo poles that were precious building materials for the locals.

This reminded Kasuga of a time he had been slapped by an officer. It was the time their troop had gotten delayed in Rangoon, just after he had come to Burma. He had been out on official duty in a sweltering heat. While he walked on the street teeming with people, he had gotten thirsty and pinched a mango from a passing fruit seller’s cart. Though he had had money, he had thought it bothersome to bargain, for he hadn’t known enough Burmese yet.