Another thing everybody knew was that the Japs were going to be double tough on the count this morning. Peterson and the other POWs had only been guessing about the crown jewels. What everybody knew turned out to be dead right this time. No one presumed even to twitch as the guards stalked along the prisoners’ ranks. One luckless fellow who sneezed with a guard right behind him got beaten and kicked till he lay on the ground, all bloody and groaning.
Peterson shuddered to think what would happen if the Japs screwed up the count even though the prisoners were cooperating. For a wonder, the guards didn’t. For what felt like an even bigger wonder, they let the POWs line up for breakfast. As always, it wasn’t much and it wasn’t good. After a day and a half of emptiness and brutal labor, anything at all in Peterson’s belly seemed wonderful. He knew he was still a starving man. But he wasn’t starving quite so fast.
After the prisoners ate, the guards pointed toward the tunnel mouth. “All go! All go!” they shouted, and, “Speedo!”-the English they used for, Make it snappy, Mac! Of course, a clout in the head with a rifle butt or a length of bamboo was as much a part of a universal language as a smile or a caress. Somehow, the poets had never got around to singing the praises of a good, solid wallop.
When the Japs said, “All go!” they weren’t kidding. They routed out the cooks and sent them into the tunnel, too. And they made the healthier prisoners-health being very much a relative term here-carry the men who were too sick to walk but not yet dead into the shaft. “American bomber!” they said. That made Peterson wonder. For one thing, the American attackers had shown exactly no signs of caring about the Kalihi Valley. For another, up till now the Japs had shown exactly zero interest in their prisoners’ safety. No, that wasn’t quite true. The Japs sometimes went out of their way to decrease safety for the POWs. Improving it was another story.
More or less fortified by his more-or-less meal, Peterson attacked the rock face with a pick. Other prisoners scooped up the rock he’d torn loose, loaded it into baskets, and carried it away. Peterson heard gunshots from the direction of the tunnel mouth. He didn’t think much of it-the Japs often got a wild hair up their ass-till a POW came staggering back toward the excavators. “They’re killing us!” he shouted. “They’re shooting us!” Then he fell over. Peterson marveled that he could have come so far so fast shot through the chest.
Work came to a ragged halt. One by one, picks and shovels fell silent. No guards lashed out with clubs or shouted, “Speedo!” and “Isogi!” In fact, no guards seemed to be in the tunnel at all.
When Peterson realized that, ice ran through him. “The Japs don’t have the crown jewels in those boxes!” he shouted. “They’ve got dynamite! They’re going to blow in the tunnel mouth and trap us in here!”
He threw down his pick. The steel head clanked on stone. A moment later, he picked up the tool again. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but he couldn’t get a better one till he knocked a Jap over the head and stole his Arisaka.
“Come on!” he yelled. “They aren’t going to get away with this, God damn them!” He started back up the long, straight shaft the POWs had dug. Nor was he the only one. Everybody who still had the strength stormed up the tunnel toward the tiny circle of light at the end.
The Japs must have known something like that would happen. They’d shifted the machine guns that had protected those crates so they pointed straight down the tunnel. They fired a burst. A few rounds struck home at once. Others viciously ricocheted off ceiling, floor, and tunnel walls before finding a prisoner to wound.
That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was listening to the machine gunners laugh as they squeezed off some more rounds. In their shoes, Peterson would have laughed, too. Why not? They could fire those Nambus till the barrels glowed red, and the poor bastards they were killing couldn’t even shoot back.
“We’ve got to keep going!” he cried. “It’s our necks if we don’t!”
“It’s our necks if we do,” somebody else said, which was just as true.
“I’d rather get shot than buried alive.” Peterson wished he had some better choices, but those seemed to be the only ones on the menu.
He’d had nightmares where he was trying to run somewhere but his feet seemed stuck in quicksand. This was one of those, except it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. If he didn’t get to the mouth of the tunnel before the camp guards did whatever they did, he never would.
Their machine gunners kept on shooting down the shaft. They kept on laughing between bursts, too. Then they stopped shooting. Peterson could think of only one reason why they would do that. They must have lit the fuse, and they were all running for cover.
And he was too far away. He knew he was too far away. He tried to force more speed from his poor, abused carcass, but a shuffling shamble was all it would give him. Quicksand, he thought desperately. Quick-
He was one of the leaders of the mob of POWs. He’d got within a hundred yards of the tunnel mouth when the Japanese explosives went up. The next thing he knew, it was black, and untold tons of rock were coming down on him. Oh, good, he thought. At least I’m not bur OSCAR VAN DER KIRK JUMPED when somebody knocked on his door a little before eleven. Susie Higgins jumped higher. She’d seen horror out on the street. Oscar had just heard about it. “Who the hell’s that?” she said, her voice shrill with fear.
“Don’t know.” Oscar heard the fear in his own voice, too. The knock came again, quick and urgent. Two years earlier, whoever it was would have just walked in. Odds were long against the door’s being locked in those days. Now… Now was a different story. Oscar’s fear swelled with each tap. Anybody out after curfew was in trouble with the Japs. Anybody in trouble with the Japs these days was as good as dead. And so was anybody who helped someone in trouble with the Japs.
“Don’t let him in,” Susie whispered.
“I’ve got to,” Oscar said. “I wouldn’t let those bastards get their hands on a gooney bird, let alone a man.”
Before Susie could start a fight-and before he could lose his nerve-he threw open the door. “Oscar,” croaked the man in the hallway. He was about Oscar’s height, but only skin and bones draped in rags. His eyes burned feverishly, deep in their sockets. A powerful stench came off him in waves, a stench that said he hadn’t bathed in weeks.
“Who the-?” But Oscar broke off with the question unfinished. “Charlie? Jesus Christ, Charlie, get your ass in here!”
Charlie Kaapu gave him a ghost of the grin he knew. “Then get out of my way.” Numbly, Oscar did. Charlie staggered past him and into the little apartment. If Oscar had ever wanted to see a dictionary illustration of the phrase on your last legs, here it was in front of him. He was so shaken, he didn’t even close the door after Charlie till Susie hissed at him.
She gasped when she got a good look at the hapa-Hawaiian. He wasn’t just four steps from starving to death. Somebody-the Japs, Oscar supposed-had been beating on him with sticks. The welts showed it: on his arms, across his face, and, visible through the holes and tears in his shirt, on his chest and back as well. He was missing some teeth he’d had when the Japs got hold of him.
He sat down on the ratty rug, as if his legs didn’t want to hold him up-and they likely didn’t. “You think I look bad, you ought to see the other poor bastards up in the Kalihi Valley,” he said. “Next to them, I’m Duke goddamn Kahanamoku.”
“Here.” Susie ran to the icebox and pulled out a couple of ripe avocados and a mackerel.