JAN LARS JENSEN

THE PACIFIC FRONT

SOMEONE HAD CAUGHT A dolphin, it now roasted over an open fire. They'd strung it
by the beak and fluke and where it hung closest to the coals the carcass was
blackened but the distinct dolphin shape persisted through the cooking. "You
like dolphin, Hiro?" someone shouted and laughter went up like sparks from the
fire. "Soo-shee soo-shee soo-shee." It only took one of them to start, then they
were all chanting. The whole camp joined in, soo-shee soo-shee, from the big
tent pitched at the foothills all the way to lookouts wading along the shore.

Hiro walked past the fires each beaded with their orange chanting faces,
threading his way to the structure known as Non-Flying Fortress. Cross-sections
of bomber lay spaced over the foothills, the gaps between each patched with
island materials, seaweed and palm leaves, long curtains of frond. Seven days,
and the bomber looked as if it had grown into place.

"No, they don't much care for you."

A rasp of a match, the momentary face of Sergeant Hellerman.

"But I don't understand," said Hiro. "We are all members of the Air Force..."

"In situations like these men need scapegoats." The sergeant shrugged. "Guess
you're the obvious choice."

Hiro didn't respond, walked past him through the dark through the trail slapped
along the way by its green gauntlet of oversized leaves. He wasn't afraid like
some of the others to leave the series of fires, wasn't worried by the island
and the unsettling patterns weathered into the rock. He left for the deserted
side where cymbal crash chasing cymbal crash of waves over shore shushed out all
other sounds. Stepping carefully in his rubber sandals he followed a path
through the island wild, stopping at the height of a cliff to stare at
moon-tipped waves recurring to the black horizon.

Before the crash he hadn't known these men. They had flown a hundred miles
together but the bomber had been strictly compartmentalized. Hiro was supposed
to have spent the flight alone, huddled into the ball gun turret, the gun
removed as a concession to weight. Mile upon mile of blue Pacific scrolled
beneath him while he waited for the plane to break through clouds over Japan,
his moment. Then, he was supposed to speak into the mike describing what he
could see, confirming or denying that they were in position over the target.

But they didn't get that far.

Somewhere over the Pacific the bomber faltered, the engine dying like someone
turning down a radio and just as smoothly descending, bouncing over wavetops and
riding onto the island. The transparent ball smashed open throwing Hiro onto
this unfamiliar ground.

Other crew members emerged from the wreck. This was the first time they met as a
complete group. Amazed they were alive. Terrified they had failed so important a
mission. "What the hell happened?" "Where are we?" Tense strangers, they stared
at one another waiting to be blamed for causing the crash.

During the silence they heard a voice.

"I'm trapped, someone please, please give me a hand..."

The voice seeped out of one upturned segment of plane. It was the bomb bay, the
whole section intact but jammed against the hillside. The bombardier inside had
no way out. Hiro and the others stared at the compartment wondering how to help.

"We could roll it up over a cliff," one lieutenant suggested. "Smash the damn
thing open." Great idea, another said, kill him quickly, and the two lieutenants
rolled away in a fist fight while the problem of releasing the bombardier
remained complete as the cylinder enclosing him. Great effort and several loose
pieces of metal went into an attempt to pry open the bomb bay doors. A night, a
day, another night. The bombardier started singing about pork chops and baked
potatoes and big sloppy buckets of draft beer. "Shut your yap!" one of the men
finally yelled. They'd never be able to adjust to this predicament, one of them
so boisterously starving to death.

The soldiers preferred problems they could solve, and most turned their
attention to making camp, outside the range of the bombardlet's voice. Hiro
studied the crumpled remains of the cockpit. He fingered different tangles of
wire hanging from its sundered walls, and by the time the bombardier started
singing of car-sized chocolate cakes and endless apple pie, Hiro had decided
which wires controlled the hydraulic bay doors. But this meant nothing without
electricity, and the batteries of the bomber were nowhere to be seen.

"Citrus fruit," Hiro said. "Copper wire."

Both were locally available and with them he patched together an amateur
battery, a crude but appropriate marriage of elements from the wreck and
elements of the island, and after carrying it gingerly to the bomb bay Hiro took
a moment to appreciate the yin-yang balance of his creation.

"Look up," someone said.

He did, and saw a gun, and behind that one of the men. Carson read the tag
stitched over his heart, and Hiro had looked at the man's raggedly wounded ear
before and thought of the eastern front; the gun he was pointing looked like
something pried from the fingers of a German corpse, too. Hiro and the others
stared in confusion.

"The item in that compartment isn't for your eyes."

"Item?" Carson was obviously confused. "We are trying to save the man inside--"

"Enough!" He cocked the hammer. "The item in that compartment is top secret. We
were supposed to drop it on Kyoto, go home, game over. Some of you know more
about our payload than others. But I don't want to hear anyone talking about it.
And nobody -- nobody -- opens those goddamn doors until we get word from above."

Someone said, "Not even to save the bombardier?"

Carson shook his head. "Fuck the bombardier."

Silence, and the day seemed to darken, the only light a candle of fanatical
devotion burning behind Carson's eyes, then other fires, bonfires, and Hiro sank
into the background after watching the man yank out the critical wires and crush
the amateur battery underfoot and eat its lemon heart.

"The doors stay shut," Carson said. "For good."

But Hiro snuck back to the compartment later, rapping on the wall and whispering
to the bombardier inside that he was very sorry his idea for opening the doors
had failed, he was sorry to raise hopes, so sorry... A tribute to meatloaf
trailed off. "I'm sure you did your best," said the bombardier, weakly.

After that the men acted like he no longer existed. They stood at the water's
edge and speculated on how the war progressed without them. They stared at the
sky and wondered why a rescue mission had not yet arrived. But they no longer
spoke of the bombardier, and Hiro wondered if he himself had also slipped from
the world as they knew it, because he was no longer invited into conversations,
he felt vaguely unwelcome in camp, he was not missed when he started making
pilgrimages to the island's loneliest reaches. The night the dolphin blackened
and burned Hiro chose the most treacherous path the island could offer,
descending a cliffside to the beach below.

Was he right about failing the bombardier? Would Carson be so protective of the
plane's secret payload if Hiro was not of Japanese descent? Soo-shee soo-shee
soo-shee, there was his answer. He walked along the beach until he was so far
away he couldn't even imagine hearing their voices.

He walked until he saw the length of bamboo sticking upright in the sand,
waiting for him.

He pulled it free and held it in both hands, savoring the waxy surface against
his palms, and memories, memories like waves to a shore flowed to him as he held
this bamboo antenna high: he was a child in Yokohama again, learning Kendo, one
hundred repetitions of a downward swing, one hundred strokes he re-enacted now
with the bamboo shaft. He forced himself to show the ocean Kendo until he no
longer felt shamed by the path his parents and grandparents made backward in
time.

While practicing the swing he heard a violent thrashing of water in the shelves
along the shore, glimpsed something flailing in a tidepool. He climbed the rock
and saw what looked like a black latex porpoise in the pool, man-made, with
goggles sewn across the head. Hiro removed his sandals and waded in, hoisting
the black body onto the rocks. Arms in the outfit were sealed along either side
of the torso, the legs merged into an articulated tail, and not until Hiro
pulled the central cord did he encounter evidence of man, the pale face of
someone who had just completed three days deep sea patrol. The patrolman
struggled his arms free of rubber, then suction released him with a thwump, sent
him rolling over the rocks, scrabbling on all fours for a moment before he
pushed onto his legs.

"I remember how to walk," the man said, surprised.

"You returned to the wrong part of the island," Hiro told him.

"No," said the patrol. "No..."

He looked toward the Pacific as if expecting something to ride in on its dark
waves, then gravely said, "I've got to tell the others."

The patrol remembered how to run but did not remember well: he pointed himself
one way but his legs veered off another several times splashing him right back
into ocean, more fish than man in his first hour returned to shore.

"Damn it! Goddamn it!"

Hiro saw the frustration on his face, the urgency of his delayed task. "This
way," he said, "like this," and squatted so the patrol could get on his back.

The island didn't like Hiro carrying the man, the ground became harder against
his feet, the trails less compliant. But he ran, the strangely muscled mass of
patrolman bouncing against his back.

"What," Hiro panted, "what must you tell the camp?"

"A submersible is heading toward the island."

"A rescue mission?" But he knew better.

"The enemy," said the patrol. "Carson isn't going to like it."

No, Hiro thought. He imagined him holding the Luger in one hand, soaking
firelight through his skin as someone told him the Japanese were coming.

Hiro realized he must have taken a wrong turn, they were running a loop. The
patrol said, "I'm glad there are no animals on this island -- but if there are
no animals then what made all these trails?"

The circularity of this question, Hiro thought, must be a comment on running in
circles. He vowed not to fail them with another redundant lap and chose a
distinctly unfamiliar path. While he was running, huffing, wondering, the
patrolman quietly asked, "What do you know about our gadget ?"

"Gadget?"

"The bomb we were supposed to drop on Kyoto."

Hiro said nothing because that was exactly how much he knew. He didn't want to
know more, didn't want Carson and the others to perceive him as a security
threat. His resistance to knowing met the patrol's reluctance to breech secrets
and the topic was dropped. But apparently the patrol needed to talk, because he
started telling a story, a strange fable or fantasy that didn't help Hiro's
concentration. A story of malevolent gods in the New Mexico desert. Now you are
become death, destroyer of worlds, one god solemnly pronounced. And the sand
turned to glass for miles around, and mere mortals were blinded by the event. It
was about a fat man and a little boy cursed with power; banished from the
desert, they traveled the world looking for someplace to dispel their terrible
new energy, but one of them got lost, he had lost his way...

The story had no ending. Or the patrolman had sensed the shift around them and
become wary.

Abrupt quiet.

No more insect music, only the movement of plants and trees as the wind shuffled
through them, or something.

Hiro sensed a great weight rising behind them. He turned with an underwater
slowness and watched a silhouette change geometry as the fuku-ryu rose from its
crouch. "Oh!" said a crackling voice in Japanese. "I thought this island was
deserted!" Crane-like it lifted a leg of aluminum over the bush and altered
configuration: these industrial wonders had walked in lines one thousand long
across Pacific isles, New Guinea, the East Indies, one nation after another
falling before their graceful of outspreading hatches, and Hiro briefly saw past
polished barrels spooled ammunition to the Place of Reverence deep inside its
fusel where a photo of Emperor Hirohito stared out at him.

"Get moving," said the patrol, digging his heels, "run; run!"

Hiro ran, heard the fuku-ryu change gears and begin its balle pursuit. The guns
started firing, counterpoints to the long-legged strides. Vegetation succumbed
to its advance, exploding alongside them and knew he couldn't avoid a similar
demise, couldn't outlast a machine whose piston soul fed on recoil. He sprinted
toward a fork in the trail.

"We must separate," he said.

"What--"

"Two targets, left and right."

"Left and--?"

"Right!"

They disengaged, the patrolman hit the ground running. Hiro went left, the other
right, a palm tree between them slid to the ground as gunfire passed through it.

"Warn the others!" the patrol shouted through the trees.

"Yes," Hiro said.

The fuku-ryu chose the other path.

"You've got to tell them!"

Yes. The machine picked up speed. He could see its metal surfaces flash through
the trees while the patrolman sank into darkness. Could anything outrun such
malice? Could Hiro? His only advantage was knowing these trails and hoping they
would delay the fuku-ryu.

He ran, he ran. He circled the island, went the long way around; he felt like he
was running the outside track of a phonograph record and started to wonder if
the camp could have ceased to exist. Then the stink of burned fish brought it
back, slices of plane staggered over rock, smears of orange blaze surrounded by
dancing silhouettes.

Dancing silhouettes? Hiro stopped.

The men had no reason to celebrate, not unless they'd found some way to get
drunk .... The revelry unsettled him. Hiro was reluctant to further, but they
had a real enemy now, and he a duty to warn his fellow soldiers.

A ring of orange bodies surged around the fire, shirts off, smeared with dirt,
hyena faces. One man with a blindfold was made to spin round and round, the rest
counting off rotations until he was so dizzy he could barely stand. They thrust
a stick in his hands and pushed him toward a tree where they'd hung a silk body,
an effigy stitched together from parachute silk -- an effigy, Hiro saw, of
himself. Buck teeth, slanted eyes. They'd pissed on it to yellow the skin. The
effigy was everyone in Japan, and it was him. His fellow soldiers laughed like
drunk Mexicans as they shoved their pig in the middle and encouraged dizzy
swings at this makeshift pinata.

Hiro pushed through the circle. Some had seen him coming and the laughter
tapered off. When he moved to the center, his battered image swinging before
him, all fell silent. Orange faces of delight suspended to wide-eyed stares.

"We were going to destroy a city," Hiro said.

There was no response.

"Our bomb," he said. The blindfolded man walloped the effigy, and its swing
pitched shadows across Hiro's face, light and dark, light and dark. The
patrolman's story returned to him, no longer an elliptical fantasy. Now he
understood.

"Our bomb was going to kill all living things. For miles, every civilian in
Kyoto. Every mother, every newborn child. Death."

They said nothing. Was their silence shame? Or disbelief? Some of them knew
everything about the weapon: secrets had been shared more freely here. They
knew, Hiro decided, and struggled to say something that would hurt them.

"The bomb is now property of the Japanese Army."

One of the lieutenants managed to pipe up. Excuse me? What?!

"A Japanese probe has come to the island. It saw our deep sea patrol and me. It
killed him, I am sure. It will kill us all, and claim our secret bomb in the
Emperor's name."

The men made noises of protest-- not without a fight they sure's hell won't --
but Hiro shoved the pig with his blindfolded swings and spoke through their
banter.

"There is no time for a fight. We must keep the weapon from falling into
Japanese hands. If its technology becomes available to the Imperial Army, the
war in the Pacific is lost."

"So what are we supposed to do?"

For a moment the question lingered, then Hiro pushed through them, up the
darkened hillside. Hie sensed more than saw that they followed, someone even
pulling along the blindfolded man by his stick. Hiro walked determinedly through
the string of fires. The biggest segment of bomber rose before him.

Carson sat atop, watching. In his lap was the blackened head of the dolphin. As
Hiro and the others gathered before him he hurled it into a fire, hard, sparks.

"What do you ladies want?"

"The bomb doors," Hiro said. "We must open them."

Carson sneered. "We've been through this already."

"The Japanese are here. On the island."

"You're the Japanese," he spat.

"We must prevent the Imperial Army from taking the bomb. We can't keep them
away. So it must be destroyed."

Carson stared, his eyes twin bonfires -- the candles had again been lit. Hiro
watched the man put his hand inside his flight uniform. "Okay," he said. "I can
oblige you there."

The other soldiers exchanged looks of surprise. Hiro knew not to trust the man,
especially now that he seemed to be smiling.

"You see," Carson went on, "I'm prepared for just such an eventuality. Someone
has to be. What I got here are instructions for preventing the enemy from
acquiring our gadget. The only foolproof way of doing so."

"Which is what?" asked one of the lieutenants.

"Detonation."

The soldiers made noises of consideration. Now Hiro had a sense of how many knew
and how many did not know the ramifications of the gadget by the proportion
saying things like Great idea! to those who remained stony in silence.

"It will kill us all," Hiro said.

"That's enough!" Carson barked. "What the fuck do you know? ! You don't know the
bomb's yield, you don't know how long we got to take cover --far as I'm
concerned you're an agent of the Japs and ought consider yourself under arrest."

"Anyone here who knows the weapon and thinks we can survive its detonation,"
Hiro said, "please speak now."

Quiet.

"Well, I'm proceeding," said Carson. "This is military business. It's protocol.
It don't matter if you been suckered by this slant." He slid off the fuselage,
the sheet of instruction flapping in his hand like a flag. "I won't let the Japs
take the bomb."

"Excuse me, son."

All eyes turned to the back of the crowd. It was Sergeant Hellerman, speaking up
at last.

"I believe I got rank here," he said. "And I want another opinion before you go
blowing anything sky high."

Hiro didn't even see Carson draw the Luger, just heard the blunt bang of the
shot that stopped Hellerman, dropped him, blood running from his forehead like
wine from a broken cask.

Carson pumped another shell, turning to Hiro. "Now who's going to hold the
little Jap still for me?"

The little Jap had yanked the stick away from the blindfolded man. Hiro took it
in both hands like mock swords of his past; he smacked it sharply against
Carson's hand. The gun sailed from his grip and landed in a nearby fire.

Hiro took a defensive stance.

Carson flexed his struck hand, his face lit with a smile of reflected fire: Hiro
had lived up to expectations. Carson reached to his boot and drew a bayonet. He
sank to a knife-fighter's crouch and pointed the bayonet at Hiro's belly.
Through the unpleasant display of teeth he said, "I've dreamed of doing this to
you."

But Hiro too had had dreams, moonlit beach dreams that stung of soo-shee,
soo-shee, soo-shee, dreams stretching back into his ancestry and reaching over
the Pacific, as he showed Kendo all the way to Japan, his reflection rippling
over the ocean as he brought his sword down and connected with land, too far
away to see but not to feel through the handle. Crack. It split in his hands,
the stick. At the opposite end Carson continued to stare at him even though his
eyes were no longer level. His face had become asymmetrical beneath the blow
Hiro crowned on him. He pulled away his broken sword and Carson fell forward,
convulsing against the ground until his body overpowered his spirit.

"The doors," Hiro said.

They assailed the compartment with more determination than before, more sense,
levers and engineering at last forcing the hatch open.

A skeleton peered out at them. A skeleton, or the bombardlet, emaciated by his
stay inside. His hair had gone strangely white. He pulled his rack of bones over
the opening and Hiro thought he heard a dry clatter when the man landed on the
ground. "You okay?" someone asked. The bombardier brushed away helping hands. He
ignored questions, statements, puzzled stares. As soon as he steadied himself he
walked into the forest and they watched the dark eat away his white figure.
"Where you going?" someone shouted.

Apple pie, they heard him say.

He was gone.

Attention returned to the open compartment. Firelight revealed the bomb but Hiro
had difficulty accepting what he saw: it looked like some swollen prototype of a
submarine -- huge. So much bigger than he'd imagined; the possibility of
dragging it from this site fizzled in him like a firework landing in a cloud. He
stared at messages scrawled over its surface. Take this, Japs! This is for the
boys of 141 st Armored! Remember Pearl Harbor!

"Can it be..."

"Disarmed?" said one of the soldiers. "I don't know. I doubt we have the tools
or the knowhow. Maybe if the bombardier helped. He knows his stuff."

"The bombardier I think is lost to us," said Hiro.

"Me and Bock can try pulling out the physics package. We can try."

But could they do so before the fuku-ryu attacked? Hiro wished he could somehow
help as he watched the men climb a service ladder and unbolt a hatch at the
bomb's apex. "Can you explain to me its operation?" They told him, or tried to,
their simplified description echoing from the hole they'd climbed down. An inner
sphere made of countless explosive charges would create an implosion. An unusual
and rare material would be compressed, this compression causing a fundamental
change in its nature, and a great release of energy, which was another way of
saying explosion .... A vague understanding made the impact no less frightening.
The only question now, it seemed, was which citizens would be vaporized by the
great release -- those who fell under the hateful wrath of Axis or Allied
commanders?

As they listened to the pair work, inside Hiro and the others Stared at the
jungle. Some held sticks or rocks, prepared to put up a hopeless fight. Hiro
wondered why the fuku-ryu was waiting so long to kill them.

Then one of the men came up from the shoreline, in tears.

"What is the matter?"

It was the second battling lieutenant; he had seen some action on other fronts
of the Pacific campaign, in losing efforts spaced over the Marianas. He spoke of
the Japanese cunning with no regard for Hiro's ancestry, describing a variety of
phonographic box that Japanese agents had placed near U.S. camps. The boxes
remained inconspicuous until certain lonely hours of the night, when they would
play music, popular hits from back home, maybe Shoo Shoo Baby or Don't Sit Under
the Apple Tree.

"Those poor dumb jarheads would hear that tune and forget themselves, dancing
away from camp, doing the foxtrot or jitterbug past the perimeter into the
jungle. When they get close enough -- bang! The box explodes, blowing the poor
homesick bugger to kingdom come."

He wiped away a tear.

"Terrible thing to do to a piece of music," the lieutenant said. "When this is
over, you think we'll ever be able to listen to tunes the same way?" He shook
his head. "We'll dive for cover every time we hear Chattanooga Choo Choo."

The anecdote made little sense to Hiro until he listened past the man's words
and heard music. Music, voices, a song. He took a few steps in the direction of
the beach. Others stopped to listen to the melody pulsing in with the waves; to
them it must have seemed nothing more than beautiful nonsense.

"Take cover," Hiro said. "Something is wrong."

Some jumped for hiding places, others kicked dirt into the orange glow of the
nearest fire. Work on the bomb continued, while the sniffling lieutenant
followed Hiro to a vantage overlooking the beach, closer to the source of music.

"What's it called?" the lieutenant asked. "I want to know the name of the song
that kills me."

"The Japanese anthem."

Hiro wondered how many people would be required to sing in unison and be heard
over an ocean? Could waves carry an anthem, if it was given proper voice? But
through these thoughts pushed a more compelling image. The fuku-ryu after it
spotted him, transmitting radio pulses to a floating naval base, a request for
an expeditionary team, and the Kaitana responding, six of them lining along the
deck then diving one by one into the ocean.

Now they had arrived. Hiro could make out six heads above the waterline, joined
in proud song as they walked ashore. The Kaitana rose from the water wearing
only breech cloths and perfumed oils. On the shore they kneeled and bowed,
touching their heads to the sand. A tortoiselike mechanical waddled after them,
issuing a neat package to each.

"Can't they see the camp?" said the lieutenant. "They must be able to see our
fires."

"Yes," Hiro said. "I'm sure they can."

"Then why are they just sitting there?"

"Meditation. Next comes the ceremony of putting on uniforms. We will have a few
minutes before they choose to engage us."

He and the lieutenant fell back, Hiro walking to the effigy and carefully
untying it from its branch. He took off his uniform and threw it onto the blaze
with the dummy. The other soldiers jumped when he returned; they were waiting
for an oriental attack, Hiro realized, without his uniform or the stars and
bars, he was as frightening a sight his former countrymen on the shore.

He threw down the rope.

"Tie me up," he said. "Tie my hands to my ankles."

"Why?"

"Like you mean it. As if I was the dummy you hung from the tree."

The lieutenant hesitated, then began wrapping the rope according Hito's
instructions. When the knots were completed Hiro fell to rubbing face and hair
into the dirt. He said to the men working on bomb, "Have you done enough to make
it a mystery?"

"No," came the reply. "No. Not for the Japs. They'll be able to figure out what
this is. Maybe a few weeks, maybe a month. The more we pull out the longer it'll
take them to get a complete understanding."

"They're sitting up!" someone shouted. "They're getting ready!"

"I think you should take any components you have," Hiro said. "Run with them.
Go. Run as far away as the island will allow and if you have a chance throw them
into the ocean."

"What about you?"

"Do it now. They will be here soon. And the only thing the Kaitana dislike more
than Japanese prisoners who haven't committed sepuku are their captors."

He was facing away from the bomb so he didn't see them pick up the pieces, but
he did watch each soldier file past him with a sober expression, as if going to
receive communion wafer, then heard the rustle of leaves as each sank into the
island wild. He listened. He listened until he heard nothing more but the spit
and crackle of bonfires, and knew he was alone here lying in the dirt. Alone
between the Kaitana and the bomb. He watched the flames. He could see nothing
else. He imagined the swordsmen completing their ceremony and falling into
stride as they marched up the hillside; when they actually rose before him it
was as if they'd been summoned from the' depths of his mind.

They looked not unlike combatants from the mechanized Kendo matches put on in
Tokyo gambling parlors; black skirts and black leather cuirasses, articulated
armor that transformed their oriental physiques to something wasplike and
potent. Every movement of the suits deferred to the swords and lacquered
ceremonial rifles fastened onto their backs. The outfits tapered into helmets
screened by slats of steel, revealing only narrow stripes of flesh and
jewel-black eyes.

Staring at Hiro on the ground. And the exposed bomb behind him. Then back to
Hiro.

The biggest of the Kaitana squatted near his head.

"Why haven't you taken your life?" he asked in polite Japanese.

"I had no gun. The Americans captured me during my attempt to run off a cliff.
Please pardon me. Would someone do the honor of removing my head?"

The Kaitana drew his sword, a bright flash of moonlight and fire, the sword
rumored to have taken down armored vehicles. Instead of Hiro's neck he slid it
against the bindings, cutting him loose. Hiro pretended to rub sore wrists and
ankles before staggering to his feet.

"You must be happy to see us."

Hiro nodded.

"How long have you been prisoner?"

"Six days. My zero crashed into the ocean. Shot down by Americans."

"Where are they now?"

"They ran when they saw you coming. Scattered. I don't know to where."

"It would be useful to have one of them alive." He pointed his sword at the
bomb, then gave instructions that one U.S. soldier must be taken for
explanation.

"Several times I heard them speaking in negative terms about a demon," Hiro
said.

The Kaitana looked at him.

"Only slowly did I realize they were referring to this bomb."

"What did they say?"

"They cursed it for making their plane crash. The more knowledgeable ones
commented on the crudity of its design; that it was more dangerous for those
transporting it than the intended victims. They called it a last ditch effort
against the Japanese. So wicked was the spirit surrounding the bomb that it
often moved them to disputes, and you can see for yourself the results." He
indicated the bodies of Carson and Sergeant Hellerman.

"It was the only thing they spoke of worse than me," he added.

"Curious they should attempt to deliver the bomb if it's so crude," said the
Kaitana leader. "I suppose we will have to leave that puzzle to the scientists
aboard Base Shiroyama."

He gave orders to prepare the bomb for transport.

Wait, said Hiro.

"Maybe we should leave it here," he continued, and attempted eye contact with
each of the Kaitana. "Perhaps this weapon was not meant to ride the sky or be
dropped, anywhere. The American plane was not shot down; the hand of fate
knocked it to the ground. Fate, like a divine wind, sending its message. If this
bomb is as terrible to the people who wield it as those it destroys, perhaps no
better place for it than a deserted rock in the Pacific."

The Kaitana paused. They stared at the open hatch and the huge dull surface of
the bomb. They had all heard him, but only the leader responded.

He raised his sword and pressed the tip against Hito's neck.

"If you have a weapon at your disposal," he said, "it only makes sense to use
it." He summoned the fuku-ryu to come assist transportation of the bomb.

The jungle exploded open, the fuku-ryu thundering forward on its long legs.
Surprised by its lack of delicacy, the Kaitana stepped back, avoiding its
haphazard trajectory. They were more surprised when it opened gun hatches and
wheeled its cannons on them. Gunshots took the commander in the chest. The other
Kaitana drew their swords and attacked the rebelling machine. Hiro took the
opportunity to fall away, and in the background he glimpsed a halo of white
hair.

The bombardier. He must have had a hand in the fuku-ryu's mechanics to create
such a violent diversion.

"Go!" the man shouted at Hiro. "Go!"

The bombardier left his shadowy hiding place and ran through the melee, leaping
back into the compartment that had imprisoned him. He jumped to the bomb's
service ladder. Hiro had no idea what the man was doing: he sang one of his
songs as he climbed, something about hamburgers or Coney Island frankfurters,
Hiro couldn't be sure. Seeing the bombardier, one of the Kaitana broke from the
battle, bringing his sword around in a powerful arc. Hiro reached into the
bonfire where the Luger lay white as coals: it still worked, the shot not
penetrating the swordsman's armor but knocking him off his feet. The bombardier
scrambled up the ladder and dropped into the bomb, one more word echoing up from
its depths.

Go!

Hiro looked around. Go where?

And then he saw it.

Do you even know how to swim? he asked himself, but there was no time to wonder,
because he was already running down the hillside, down the beach, splashing into
the water, he was diving...

Beneath the waterline was an even stranger sight than those he had so far
witnessed. The patrolman, somehow still alive. He was in his deep sea diving
suit and beckoning Hiro onward. He didn't understand how the man could have
survived the fuku-ryu, and wondered if what he saw wasn't the patrolman at all
but a black dolphin. Whatever the case Hiro could not keep up with the strange
entity swimming circles around him or remain underwater with such ease. He
surfaced briefly to look back at the fires that tinged the face of the island.
Then he dove again, deeper, down to where the black dolphin beckoned him, and
suddenly the water was flooded by light, light pouring after him, lighting the
depths of the Pacific like an underwater sun, and Hiro swam deeper into the
strange new world the detonation of the bomb had suddenly illuminated around
him.