Fletch Armitage stood in a good-sized crowd watching the amateur lumberjacks. It gave him something a little out of the ordinary. Two squads of Japanese soldiers also watched the tree-fellers-and the other prisoners. They were there to make sure the axes didn’t disappear into the camp after the job was done. None of the Americans got close to them. When other trees came down, everyone had seen that they had short fuses.
“No more shade,” a prisoner near Fletch said sadly. Fletch nodded, but his heart wasn’t in it. He liked shade as much as the next guy, but you didn’t have to have it in Hawaii, the way you would in a place where the sun could knock you dead. He was as pale as anybody in the camp, but even he could see that firewood counted for more. He wondered what the POWs would do when no more trees were left inside the barbed-wire perimeter.
A crackle like distant machine-gun fire snapped his attention back to the pine. “Timberrrr!” yelled one of the woodcutters-a cry he’d surely learned at the movies and not in the great north woods. Down came the tree, and slammed into the grass. Fletch wished it would have fallen on the Japs, but no such luck. They were too canny to let themselves get smashed.
The sergeant in charge of the guards collected the axes. Only after he had them both did he shout something in Japanese to his men. They chose volunteers-that was what it amounted to-and handed out saws. The POWs they’d picked went to work turning the fallen pine, which had to be sixty or seventy feet tall, into chunks of wood convenient for cooking food and boiling water. The guards watched these prisoners no less intently than they had the axemen. As far as they were concerned, saws were weapons, too.
Watching a fallen tree turned into firewood was less interesting than watching it fall in the first place. Along with most of the crowd, Fletch drifted away. If he hung around, there was always the chance that the Japs would find work for him, too. The Geneva Convention said officer prisoners genuinely had to volunteer to work, but the Japs hadn’t signed it and respected it only when they wanted to. They didn’t feed him well enough to make him feel like doing anything more than he had to.
“How’s it going, Lieutenant?” That was Arnie, the ersatz artilleryman who’d surrendered along with Fletch.
“What could be better? It’s the beachfront by Waikiki, right?” Fletch said. “I’m just waiting for the waitress to bring me another gin and tonic.”
Arnie grinned. He was skinnier than Fletch remembered. Of course, Fletch was probably skinnier than he remembered, too. He just didn’t get to see himself very often. Arnie said, “You got a good way of looking at things.”
“My ass,” Fletch told him. “If I had a good way of looking at things, I would have gone over the hill with Clancy and Dave.”
“Wonder what the hell happened to ’em,” Arnie said.
“Whatever it is, could it be worse than staying in the Royal Hawaiian here?” Fletch asked. He got another smile out of Arnie. Considering how things were in the camp, that was no mean feat.
But nobody was laughing a couple of days later. The guards started shouting for a lineup in the middle of the morning. That was out of the ordinary. By now, Fletch had learned to view anything out of the ordinary with suspicion. The Japs didn’t break routine to hand out lollipops.
He hoped there’d been an escape. Most of him hoped so, anyhow. People who left the perimeter on work details talked about “shooting squads”: groups of ten where, if one man ran, all the others got it in the neck. That was a brutally effective way to convince prisoners not to try to make a break-and to stop the ones who did want to try. There were no shooting squads inside the camp, though. If somebody’d dug a tunnel and sneaked off, more power to him.
Fletch’s hopes sank when the guards didn’t count and recount the men lined up in neat rows. They would have if they thought they were missing people, wouldn’t they? The commandant scrambled up onto a table in front of the POWs. As soon as he got up there, all the prisoners bowed. There would have been hell to pay if they hadn’t. Much less athletically, a local Japanese in a double-breasted suit that didn’t go with his tubby build clambered onto the table with the officer.
The Jap commandant shouted in his own language. He had one of those voices that could fill up as much space as it had to. A whole regiment could have heard his orders on the battlefield. The interpreter tried twice as hard and was half as loud: “We have captured four American soldiers. They did not surrender at the proper time. This makes them nothing but bandits. We treat bandits the way they deserve. Let this be a lesson to all of you.”
Guards marched in the four Americans. Poor bastards, Fletch thought. They’d been stripped to the waist. Their faces and torsos showed cuts and bruises. The Japs must have worked them over after they were caught. One of them staggered like a punch-drunk palooka. How many times had they hit him in the head? If he didn’t know everything that was going on around him, maybe he was luckier than his buddies.
None of them was Dave or Clancy. Fletch was glad of that. And then, in short order, he wasn’t glad of anything any more. To him, hung by the thumbs had always been a joke, something people said but nobody would ever do.
The Japs weren’t kidding. They tied ropes to a horizontal length of wood that had to be twelve feet off the ground, and to the Americans’ thumbs. They were viciously precise about it, too, making sure their captives had to stand on tiptoe to keep their thumbs from taking all their weight. Once they’d tied them, they gagged them. And then they walked away.
Another shout from the camp commandant. “Dismissed!” the interpreter said.
Japanese soldiers stood guard around the four Americans. They made sure none of the ordinary POWs drew near. The men they’d captured just hung there, without food, without water, without hope. Fletch didn’t need long to realize the Japs intended to let them die there. Every so often, one of them would sag down off his toes as weariness overcame him, only to be jerked up again by the agony in his hands. The rags tied over their mouths didn’t muffle all the noises they made.
It took six days before they hung limp and unmoving. The guards cut them down with bayonets. They crumpled to the ground. Even after that, though, one of them tried to roll himself up into a ball. The Japs stared at him, gabbling in their own language. One of them ran off to get an officer.
When the officer came back with him, he took a look at the feebly wiggling American, then snapped out a command in his own language. “Hai! ” the guards chorused. Three of them raised their rifles and aimed them at the man they’d made into an example. The Arisakas barked together, too. After that, the American didn’t move any more.
With gestures, the guards ordered some of the POWs to drag the dead bodies to the burying ground. There already was one, for men who came down sick and couldn’t find the strength to get better on what the Japs fed them-and for men the Japs killed one way or another.
Fletch was the third man a guard pointed at. He didn’t try protesting that the Japanese couldn’t make him work. If he had, he figured two more POWs would have dragged him to the burying ground. The corpse whose ankle he had hold of didn’t weigh much; all the water was gone from it.
“You damn sorry son of a bitch,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” The corporal who had the other leg shook his head. “He’s liable to be the lucky one. It’s over for him. How long will it last for us?” Fletch had no answer. The dead man’s head bumped along the ground. Will that be me one day? Fletch wondered. He had no answer for that, either.
“WHERE ARE YOU going?” Hiroshi Takahashi asked.
“Away from here. Any place at all away from here,” Kenzo answered. They were both speaking English to keep their father from knowing what they were saying. “I can’t stand hanging around this miserable tent.” He didn’t come right out and cuss; his dad knew what swear words were, all right.