The Nicholas Linnear Novels (42 page)

It was the season of rain; there seemed no dry ground on all of Leyte. We made progress but not without casualties, of course. One night the unit was forced to move on. There were a number of wounded who needed taking care of. I volunteered to stay behind for a short time so that I could properly bandage them. There was a relief column due in the morning. But the situation was far too volatile and my CO insisted I move out with the rest of the unit.

We made camp just before dawn. Many of us were too tired to fall asleep. We sat around and talked about Dracula. Three men had been killed the night before; the vampire theories were at their height.

At last I left them, pitched my tent and crawled inside. For a time I could hear their voices as they continued to talk, then the sounds stopped. I wasn’t sure whether I had fallen asleep or they had just broken up for the night.

I was in that odd state between sleeping and wakefulness. I thought I dreamed someone was there, watching me. I tried to wake myself but I couldn’t. My head felt like it was too heavy to lift up. I strained but nothing happened. It was as if my consciousness had somehow been severed from the nerve impulses which mechanized the muscles. I wanted to look behind me, you know, over my head, certain that was where the danger was coming from. I could make no move.

Above me a face hovered in the air, disembodied. I don’t know when my eyes had actually opened or whether they had ever really been closed. My chest felt heavy and I seemed to have trouble breathing. I felt cold. Not as if the night was chill but from inside. I shivered.

It was a Japanese face, coal-black as if it had been coated with charcoal or lampblack. It was dull so that no light would reflect off it. His eyes seemed very large. They had an odd light to them as if, while they stared right at me, they were focused on another universe. It was eerie. I had seen something like it once in a hospital when I was in my last year of medical school. We went into the psycho wing and I saw several patients. One was a young man, not far past twenty. His hair was cropped close. He had high cheekbones and a long thin nose. He could have been a scholar. He was in a straitjacket. I watched his eyes for a long time, while beside me the resident droned his spiel like a carnival barker. I felt like a shill. This man, this… creature was far beyond the supposedly modern and humane treatments the resident was describing in such loving detail. This man had reverted. He was certainly no longer human but had returned to the animal state of his ancestors. There was no hint of what we might term “intelligence” in his eyes; at least not as modern man defines intelligence. But I saw cunning there, of a kind and in a strength which terrified me. For a moment I fantasized what it would be like having this man loose in the world. Richard Speck? Gary Gilmore? Jack the Ripper? It was beyond imagining. For this was a man who was clearly beyond morality.

Now you know some of what I saw in the eyes hovering above me that night on Leyte. But not all. To call this “madness” would be to seriously underestimate it, for it was far more. Ours is a world of order, ruled by laws. From science to morality there are parameters within which we all live. This man did not. He lived outside time as if residing within him, lending him all its ferocious energy, was the essence of chaos. I don’t know how to better describe it, but seeing him thus in the flesh only underscored the fact rather than the fiction of his supernatural origins. Perhaps, after all, our vampire stories had not been so far off the mark. I know, I know, this all sounds rather fanciful—pulled out to give a good Gothic kick to this story. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

While I thought of all this, I felt his movement. He produced a matte black length of cloth and, folding it upon itself, wrapped it painfully tight across my mouth. He was quite close to me now and I saw that he was dressed all in black.

He hauled me out of the tent and, stooping, slung me over his shoulder.

He ran.

He ran without sound. No shadow trailed behind us; we were never in the light. He took a route out of the encampment that was neither direct nor circuitous. It was merely undetectable, as if he were following a path no one else suspected of being there; a path made just for him.

I didn’t struggle. I found myself wondering why I hadn’t been killed as the other victims of these silent infiltrations had been. I was amazed. Even upside down I could see well enough to know that he was a magician. No one I knew could possibly have gotten in and out of our encampment totally undetected as this man had. He moved without seeming motion. That must sound like a contradiction but it’s not. He ran with such fluidity that there was no up and down motion, merely the sensation of forward movement.

We were in the jungle now, traveling extremely quickly. In fact, even though the way was now more choked with foliage and underbrush, our speed actually increased. His strength and endurance were exceptional. We were totally alone in the world, or so it seemed to me. It was that time of the night when the nocturnal creatures have crawled back into their holes to sleep and the diurnal animals have not yet awakened. The jungle was quite still, just a sleepy bird calling here and there, the sounds quite isolated and seeming part of another world.

We traveled thus for perhaps thirty minutes. Then the man stopped abruptly and, spinning me off his shoulder, widened the cloth around my mouth so that I was now blindfolded also. He led me, stumbling, through the jungle. His fingers were at the back of my jacket so that, each time I fell, he suspended me as if I was hanging from a coat hook. It was a terribly dehumanizing thing to do and I tried to shut my mind to it.

After a time I began to hear voices. I did not speak Japanese but I understood enough to get by; it was something I did not want him to know. At length the blindfold was removed. We were in the midst of a Japanese camp. It wasn’t anything like what I had pictured. In fact, I was aghast; I thought for an instant that he had taken me to a hospital; it hardly seemed like a military camp at all. For one thing, most of the soldiers were either lying down or sitting. I saw no troops as such; no guards.

We were near the water, though on which side of the island I could not tell. I saw the water clearly through a gap in the vegetation. I watched for a time, totally unmolested, while the man who had brought me spoke with several of his fellows who were identically dressed. These seemed to be the only operational men in the camp. At first I tried to pay attention to what they were talking about, but either they were speaking too fast or in some dialect I had never heard because I couldn’t understand them.

Dawn had broken and there was a white line just above the horizon; I knew I must be looking east. I saw a smudge coming into view and then another. I heard, simultaneously, a heavy drone from the northwest, in the direction of Luzon. It was the Two Hundred and First. I looked up. The Zeros were black and bloated against the pale sky. The night’s clouds had melted away.

The Zeros passed low over us, headed out to sea, toward the dark smudges staining the horizon, coming closer.

“You know they go to attack your ships.”

I started. A thin Japanese stood beside me. He was on crutches. His left trouser leg was pinned back at the knee but he’d surely die of malnutrition before his stump would begin to bother him.

“You speak English very well,” I said.

“Yes.” He was still staring out at the moving targets as they closed with one another. “They will not come back. None of them. Onishi has seen to that.” I understood that he meant the new Vice-Admiral. He shook his head sadly. “They say, you know, that he helped Yamamoto plan the Pearl Harbor attack.” He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “It’s hard to believe. It seems so long ago.” His head turned. “Do you speak Japanese? No? Pity.” He turned back. The Zeros were nearing our ships. You could see the batteries begin to fire. Black clouds with orange bits in their centers exploded, eerily silent until, moments later, the reports found us, shook the air. “No, they won’t come back, those boys. They’re on a one-way mission.”

Abruptly, his words penetrated the fog which had surrounded me since I had come into the camp. “Do you mean to tell me,” I exclaimed, “that they’re on suicide missions? The plane and the pilot…?”

“One big maneuverable bomb, yes.” The Japanese stood quite still. Tears seemed to be standing in the corners of his eyes but there was no change in his voice. “Vice-Admiral Onishi’s idea. It’s a desperation move. He had a time convincing the others but he managed it.” He said something in Japanese which I took to be a curse. “Not enough of us have died for this ‘noble cause.’ The Emperor still sends his sons into a war which we have already lost.” Far away, on the white and black horizon, the Zeros were leaving the sky.

There came a sharp call from behind me. I did not need to understand the language to know that my captor wanted me. I walked away from the crippled soldier, saying, “You ought to get something to eat.”

He laughed shortly. “If I could, do you think I’d be here now?”

“What about a hospital?”

“Won’t take you in unless you bring your own food,” he said. His eyes were clear. I could see his ribs underneath his uniform blouse. I thought: What am I doing? He is the enemy. “We’re all dying of malnutrition. We can’t get into the hospital and our unit’s booted us out because we can’t fight anymore. It’s not a soldier’s end. There’s no honor in any of this.” He stared at me and, for a moment, there seemed to be no difference between us.

Then my captor had hold of me and, barking harshly, he pushed me toward another part of the camp. Here, too, soldiers littered the ground. It seemed pathetic.

He carried with him a small black satchel which I hadn’t noticed before. It was over this that they seemed to be arguing. There were perhaps four of them. They might have been brothers. Now I regretted not asking my unexpected friend who these men were. It was clear that they weren’t regular army. To one side, I saw what was obviously a cooking fire. There was a black iron pot. By its side was a small pile of what the Japanese called
kamote
, the diminutive Philippine potatoes that taste rather like a conventional sweet potato. There were also some withered tubers. These were obviously their rations: all the food they possessed.

The man who had brought me produced a series of cans he had obviously stolen from our camp. How he had spirited this food away I could not imagine, but there it was.

They began to argue all over again—I suppose about who would get how much. My captor hustled me away, shoved me down toward several of the supine men. It was clear that he wanted me to work on them. Now I understood why I had been spared. He knew very well what I was. I began to wonder what else he knew about me.

I turned to the soldiers. In truth there wasn’t much I could do for them. I was without my instruments and my medicines. But they would not have been much help. My friend had been quite correct in his analysis of the situation. The Japanese were dying of malnutrition.

At length I got up, went over to the man who had brought me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s nothing I can do.”

He hit me without warning. I didn’t even see where the blow came from. One moment I was standing and talking to him, the next I was on my ass in the mud.

“They need food,” I said inanely.

He reached down and hauled me up. There seemed to be no expression in his eyes. He hit me again, this time harder, with the edge of his hand. It felt like I had been struck by a cement mixer. I went down and stayed down.

It was dark when I awoke. I had a splitting headache and my right shoulder didn’t seem to work. It was odd. I could wiggle my fingers, even make a loose fist, but I couldn’t raise my arm even an inch off the ground.

I was in a tent, lying on something hard. Now I could tell it wasn’t the ground. I had my jacket and fatigue shirt on but no pants. I was naked from the waist down. I tried to move but couldn’t. If I strained hard enough I could just about move the table or whatever it was I was on. But my head began to throb so powerfully that I soon had to stop. My entire body seemed to pulse with the pain. There were flashes behind my eyes and I wondered what he had done to my nerves.

Shortly after, he came in. I didn’t hear him but felt some stirring of the humid air. His face loomed over me. He had removed the lampblack from his face but not the black clothing. This, apparently was his uniform.

“What is your troop strength?” he asked.

I understood. Having proved useless in my healing capacity, I was now a full-fledged prisoner of war. I knew what that meant.

I told him my name.

“How much firepower have you?”

I told him my name.

“With which units will you rendezvous?”

I told him my name.

“What is the American timetable for linkup?”

This time I varied it. I gave him my rank and serial number.

“When do the Americans plan to launch their invasion of Luzon?”

“Luzon has already been invaded,” I said. “By the Japanese.”

Then he began to work on me. He used nothing but the ends of four fingers: his two thumbs and forefingers. No blades, no heat, no drugs, no wire, no water. None of the traditional interrogator’s tools. He had no need for anything so crude.

He worked on me for all of the night—more than ten hours. Oh, not constantly, of course; I never could have taken that. And at the end of that time there was not a mark on my body.

He was, truly, a magician. He worked on the nerves. Not just the major nerve centers as might be expected, but the nerve chains themselves. Just his fingers squeezing.

Everything else ceased to exist. He saw to that. It became, after a while, a kind of sensory deprivation situation: I felt nothing but pain. Even the two or three times I urinated, I couldn’t feel it, only smelled it for a time. Then that, too, was obliterated.

He used pain the way a clever woman can use pleasure. You know the way a woman leads you up the pleasure curve, slowly, lovingly, gently, until you’re throbbing for release. She’ll bring you to the brink, hold you there for exquisite moments, then stop until the excitement subsides and she starts all over again. Finally, when you come, the sensation is better than it’s ever been before. This man used the same principle. You know terrible pain can become its own anesthetic—just like when you fuck too much, you go numb for a while. So, too, with pain. Even your nerves have a limit, and after a while they just shut down and you feel nothing. That can be your only advantage in intensive interrogation.