“Not a problem. Like I said, he’ll enjoy your company.”
With that, Sarah and Jen walked to the cottage. Sarah opened the door to the cottage and they stepped inside. The cottage was neat and tidy. The walls were covered with dozens of pictures showing the generations of Kataros on various holidays throughout the country. Oddly, Jen couldn’t see a single picture of Joe when he was a soldier. Most soldiers she met had several pictures of them and their friends adorning the walls. Sarah looked about and then called out for her grandfather. A couple of seconds later, a small man dressed in a pair of old jeans and a freshly ironed plaid shirt walked out from the kitchen. He had a full set of silver hair and wore thick glasses on his weathered face. If Jen did not know his real age, she would have guessed that he was only in mid-seventies. It was obvious that he had taken care of himself as he had grown older, likely through a regular regimen of exercise and a healthy diet.
“Hello again, Joe,” said Sarah. “This is Jennifer March, the historian I told you about.”
Joe looked over at Jen and smiled. “You never told me that she was also one of those runway models you see on the cover of all those magazines in the supermarket.”
Jen and Sarah exchanged a smile.
“Why, thank you, Joe, that’s very sweet of you,” said Jen, extending her hand in greeting.
Joe reached over and firmly shook Jen’s hand.
Sarah said, “Joe, I need to pick up the boys from swimming lessons. I’ll come back in just over an hour. Is there anything you need me to do before I go?”
“No, I’ll be fine here with Jennifer. You can, however, tell me when I’m going to be blessed with another great-grandson?”
Sarah shook her head. “Joe, I keep telling you that this time I’m having a girl. Three boys are enough. I want a girl.” With that, she leaned over, kissed his forehead, and left the cottage.
“Shall we talk in the kitchen?” said Joe.
Jen followed him. Together they sat down at a small wooden table.
“Before we begin, would you like a cup of tea?” asked Joe.
“Yes, please,”
“The kettle is over there, and the tea is in the cupboard beside the stove,” said Joe with a smile on his face that stretched from ear to ear.
Jen smiled back and stood to make the tea. As she looked about the kitchen, she saw more pictures of Joe and his large family. The photographs stretched back whole generations. There were a couple of newer photos of Joe proudly cradling newborn children in his arms beside black-and-white pictures of a very young Joe and his wife standing outside of the cottage. Jen could tell that Joe was a man who treasured his family.
“The picture you’re looking at is of my wife Emiko and me when we first arrived here in the States,” said Joe, his voice tinged with a hint of melancholy. “Those were some of the happiest days of our lives together. She’s been gone going on fifteen years now, and I miss her more each day.”
“She was a beautiful woman,” said Jen honestly.
“My Emiko was the most beautiful woman I ever laid eyes upon. We met right after the war and were married a month later. I am happy to say that we were blessed with three wonderful children. Garry, our oldest, was killed in Vietnam two days shy of his nineteenth birthday. Mark, the next oldest, moved to Canada when he was in his early thirties. I still see him and his family from time to time. Denise settled in town and had a large family, six wonderful children who have remained in and around Vermont. In all, I have nine grandchildren and twenty-three great-grandchildren.”
“Wow, and I thought my family was large. We’re amateurs compared to yours.”
A minute later, Jen sat down at the table and handed Joe his tea.
Jen took a deep breath and then looked over into Joe’s deep-brown eyes. “Joe, I have a confession to make, I didn’t come up here to discuss your time as a translator in post-war Japan.”
Joe furrowed his brow. “Then why did you come here?”
“Joe, some people I know are in danger. I need to know about Unit 881 and what they were doing on Matua Island during the war.”
A look of alarm flashed across Joe’s face.
The room grew quiet and uncomfortable; the only sound came from the clock ticking away over the stove.
“Miss March, are you with the government?” asked Joe.
“No sir, I’m not. It’s kind of difficult to explain, but I really need to know about Unit 881. My friends have become embroiled in something none of us understands. I’m not exaggerating when I say their lives are at stake.”
Joe looked away for a moment; his eyes glazed over as he stared out the kitchen window as if looking back in time.
“Sir, it’s important. I wouldn’t have come up here if I didn’t think that you could have helped me,” said Jen, trying to get Joe’s attention.
Turning his head, Joe looked over at Jen. “First, please call me Joe. I hate being called sir, it makes me feel old, and secondly, I’ve kept my mouth shut for decades about what was going on there. I don’t see the harm in telling you. Uncle Sam can come up here and arrest me if he wants.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” said Jen, raising her fingers up to do her best two-fingered scouts’ salute.
“I can see in your eyes that you are very worried. Is someone you love in harm’s way?”
“Yes, there is; his name is Ryan Mitchell, and I love him deeply,” replied Jen, her voice cracking.
“Come with me, Jennifer,” said Joe as he stood and led Jen out into the living room. Walking over to the wall, Joe removed a watercolor painting of the lake outside his home and then reverently turned it over in his hands. He looked longingly down at the back of the frame for a moment before handing the picture over to Jen.
“Remove the backing,” said Joe, taking a seat.
Carefully removing the cardboard backing, Jen was surprised to find a series of folded up letters and hand-drawn pictures hidden inside. Removing them, she placed the picture down on a side table and then took a seat across from Joe.
“I figured someone one day would want to talk about Unit 881. So about fifteen years ago I jotted down what I could from memory.”
Jen looked down at the papers in her hands. One was a map of a tunnel system that ran underneath the island, along with several pages of notes on Unit 881 and what it was testing on the island before it fell. Jen smiled. She had hit the jackpot.
“Miss March, you have to understand. In 1944, I was an eighteen-year-old boy and was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army. My eyesight has always been poor, so I was trained to be a radio operator. Dispatched to Matua Island in January of 1945, I was assigned to work with one of the scientists attached to Unit 881 on a project codenamed Black Dragon. His name was Professor Tanaka.”
“Why you?”
“A question I have been asking myself my entire life,” replied Joe, with a grin on his face. “I spoke passable English and Professor Tanaka needed someone who could talk to the Russian scientists working with him.”
“Pardon me, did you say Russian scientists were working for the Japanese?”
“Yes, they were White Russians; anti-communist zealots who had been captured in Northern China. They willingly helped Imperial Japan in preparing weapons of mass destruction to be used against the allied powers. Tanaka couldn’t speak a word of Russian, but one of them, a young man whose name I cannot remember now, spoke English, so I acted as an intermediary for the professor, translating things back and forth. I wasn’t his first translator. Another poor soul had my job for a couple of years before me but he died from pneumonia.”
“What were they building?”
“I’m not a very technical person and most of what I translated was lost on me. It was all scientific gobbledygook as far as I was concerned. However, I will never forget that they were working on a bomb that they planned to somehow deliver from the air.”