Moaning and numb with terror, the first ten were tied to the stakes. Captain Kashii signaled, and the machine gun commenced an insanely loud chattering that drowned out all other sounds. The victims jumped and writhed as the bullets tore into them, sending a spray of blood and flesh into the air. Then everything was still, and the bodies lay limp in their ropes. After a few seconds, some people in the crowd started screaming, but they were ignored. Soldiers untied the victims and dragged their bodies to the wall behind. A couple of them twitched and may still have been alive.
A second ten were brought forward, tied, and machine-gunned. The process was continued until only the last ten remained, and they too were tied to the now badly splintered stakes. The ground before them was so soaked with the blood of the preceding victims that red puddles had formed, and the crowd had ceased screaming or crying out. The mound of dead and dying behind the stakes had become a stack of bloody, raw meat as bullets that missed their targets had smacked into the bodies.
With the last ten in place, Kashii gave another signal, and ten soldiers with bayonets on their rifles took their places, one in front of each victim. Kashii bellowed an order, and the soldiers began their practice. First, they lunged their blades into the meat of their victims’ inner thighs, then the muscle of the upper arms. The last ten shrieked for mercy, but there was none. More thrusts slashed at their buttocks, the backs of their calves, the cheeks of their faces, their eyes, and, finally, slashing, disemboweling thrusts to the victims’ stomachs finished it.
Even so, it would take a while for some of them to die. The crowd was dismissed, but soldiers stood guard over the bloody place. Kashii ordered that no bodies be removed for at least twenty-four hours as an example.
The captain strode over to Goto and smiled. There was blood spattered on Kashii’s uniform. “Well, that ought to keep them in line. If it doesn’t, we’ll do it again and again until it does.”
The man loves to kill, Goto thought, and then laughed harshly to himself. And Omori thought I was a problem. At last, he congratulated himself, I am serving under a real leader.
“Some of the people in Hilo will move out, Captain.” Goto’s intelligence operatives told him that several hundred had already departed and more would follow. In a little while, Hilo could be a ghost town.
“Let them,” Kashii said. “There will be no food for them. They’ll come back.”
“Captain, any more clues as to the murderer or his helpers?”
“The killer was an American. One had been seen skulking around the day before, but it was unreported and apparently had happened earlier under the lax administration of my predecessor. But no, I did not get any information regarding specific assistance given to the assassin. Now I don’t need it. A message has been sent. I am confident it will not happen again.”
Goto agreed with Kashii. The Americans would be cowed by what had happened and would not attempt such a murder again. Unless, of course, someone struck at Kashii in revenge for this day. Goto saw how the captain’s actions might have launched a spiral of violence.
Good, he thought. Finally, he felt he was serving under a Japanese warrior.
CHAPTER 17
Lieutenant Brooks was appalled at the Japanese reaction to his killing of Major Shimura. Still, Jake felt compelled to read the young lieutenant the riot act, which he did with a vengeance.
It had taken Brooks several days to return from Hilo through Japanese patrols that were suddenly out in force. Prudently, he had taken a circuitous route back to the main American camp, and it was only then that he found out about what was being called the Massacre of the Innocents.
“I never thought the Japs would do anything like that,” Brooks had said with sincere contrition. He had never dreamed that he would cause anything so awful to occur, and the news had made him physically ill. He had killed an enemy soldier, which was what he had been trained to do.
“You never thought is right,” Jake had snapped. “Look, I’m sorry your brother was killed in the Philippines, damned sorry, but that doesn’t give you the right to go off and start your own private war. If I’d known you were going to shoot that Jap, I’d have stopped you from leaving camp. That Jap you killed was so stupid he was one of our best allies. Now they’ve replaced him with someone who can actually think, and that’s likely to cause still more people to die.”
“It won’t happen again, sir.”
Jake pushed his face right up to Brooks’s. He was taller than the small, wiry Raider. “Damn right it won’t. You take any actions without my orders and I’ll bust your ass right down to buck private. Is that understood?”
“Yessir.”
“And another thing. I have just promoted Hawkins to the temporary rank of captain. Whether or not I have that authority, I don’t care.
I just want it clearly understood that he’s in command and not you if something should happen to me. Understood?” Brooks’s head bobbed up and down. “Good. You’re dismissed.”
Hawkins came over as Brooks departed, his shoulders slumped in dejection. “Everybody makes mistakes, Colonel, but he made a doozy. A hundred dead people because of his actions is a little hard to take. We gotta help him live with that so it doesn’t destroy him.”
Jake agreed. “I’ll ease up on him tomorrow. You’re right, I don’t want to destroy him as an officer or as a person. Let him spend a night thinking about it, though. Now, let’s talk about our new member. Who the hell is Charley Finch, and why does he make me uncomfortable?”
Hawkins chuckled. “For one thing, if he’s been on the lam for a couple of months, like he says, he looks too well fed and plump to me.”
“Right. Did you know him before the war?”
“I knew of him, but I never really met him. I saw him a few times at the NCO club and knew he was in supply, but we never hung around.”
“What was his reputation?”
“A low-level crook and overall shady character, which may explain why he is so plump and juicy. He’s one of those guys who could hustle his way out of anything, so he may have been doing exactly what he said he was, being fed and cared for by locals and by stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down.”
Finch had arrived the day before. He claimed that he’d escaped from a Japanese work gang a couple of months earlier, and that his fellow prisoners had all been shipped to Japan. He said he’d been hidden by sympathetic Hawaiians on Oahu who’d helped him make his way to Maui, where he’d stayed with an old Hawaiian woman who’d cared for him and kept him hidden. Then, as Finch explained it, she died and he made his way to Hawaii all by himself in a small boat he’d swiped.
“It’s a great story,” Jake said, “and there’s nothing that can be verified. His fellow prisoners are gone, the old lady’s dead, the boat’s stolen, and he’s already said he can’t quite recall the people on Oahu who helped him because he was so sick at the time. He may not be a yachtsman, but he just could be good enough to take a small boat from Maui to Hawaii. It’s less than thirty miles from one island to the other, and I don’t think he’d ever even be out of sight of land on a sunny day.”
Hawkins grinned. “I take it you don’t trust him.”
“Hawk, the old army was a small club, and the garrison on Oahu was an even smaller chapter of that club. Everyone knew everybody else, and, yeah, I knew about good ol’ Sergeant Charley Finch. Hell, everybody did. You’re right, he was a minor crook and a total shit. Keep this under your rusty helmet, Hawk, but he was under investigation by the FBI.”
Hawkins whistled. “Why?”
“Stealing army stores and selling them. I got involved in my intelligence capacity because the FBI thought he was selling weapons to gangsters and other people who didn’t like the United States.”