“Sun-Hi woke us,” Dalmar smiled broadly as he clapped a meaty hand on Jonah’s back. “She explored these buildings and discovered something of great importance.”
“Care to fill me in?” asked Jonah.
Dalmar waggled a single finger in his face. “It is always better to show.”
Jonah followed Dalmar into the largest of the darkened buildings, their feet crunching on broken glass and concrete fragments. A single interior metal door clung to its frame, bent and almost falling off its hinges. Dalmar pried it open, grinning at Jonah’s grimace when the rusting steel dragged loudly across the concrete. On the other side of the door was a narrow, cylindrical well with a steep spiral staircase leading into the depth below.
“She found a bunker?” asked Jonah.
“Yes — but it is so much more.”
Dalmar took the lead as they together walked down the stairwell. The last rays of sunlight disappeared as Dalmar ignited his flare, illuminating the narrow chamber in harsh, iridescent reds.
“This is unexpected,” said Jonah. “How deep does it go?
“Alexis says at least two hundred feet.” “Why didn’t anybody wake me?”
Dalmar stopped briefly to face Jonah. “Sun-Hi insisted you rest. Hassan agreed, and Dalmar always follows doctor’s orders.”
“Right.” Jonah eyed him suspiciously, but didn’t protest. After all, conspiracy among the crew typically ended in worse results than a few extra hours of uninterrupted sleep.
The spiral staircase stretched deep within the ancient layers of volcanic bedrock. There was no door at the base, just an opening into an underground tunnel. Jonah reached up and touched the walls — the stairwell had intersected a natural volcanic lava tube deep within the island. The tunnel walls were rough, barely hewn from the original rock, the floor of the cave made level by a thick layer of smoothed concrete.
“This way.” Dalmar pointed to a side passage. The natural lava tubes had formed an entire network of intersecting tunnels, massive in scale. Jonah followed him in, the tube opening up into a large bubble-like chamber illuminated by a half-dozen scattered lamps. Hassan sat cross-legged in the center of the room, sketching notes onto the dusty floor with a piece of charcoal. Surrounding him were endless rows of aluminum tanks and cisterns, snaking pipes and other industrial equipment. Jonah tried and failed to imagine the sheer amount of manpower that it would have taken to assemble the subterranean laboratory.
“Jonah!” exclaimed the doctor, yanking his head up from his scribblings. “I’ve learned a great deal about the island since we last spoke.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Jonah, squatting down beside him. “Is this some kind of abandoned World War II facility?”
“No — well, yes and no,” answered the doctor cryptically. “I knew what this facility was from the moment I laid eyes on this room. There’s a whole underground complex— some sections collapsed and inaccessible, of course— making this room just one of dozens. See these machines and equipment?”
“Yeah,” said Jonah, glancing around at the unfamiliar technology. “I don’t know what any of this stuff is.”
“Very few people would,” said Hassan. “It’s biological research equipment. Active material tanks, fermentation cisterns, spray dryers, filling machines. Everything you’d need to refine and weaponize anthrax, cholera, even plague.”
Jonah hesitated suddenly, wondering if he should stop breathing.
“Oh, it’s perfectly inert now,” said Hassan dismissively. “Has been for decades. I’d recommend a tetanus booster to the crew, but only given the degree of rust that has accumulated.”
“So this is from the second World War… but it isn’t’?”
“Precisely!” said Hassan, almost leaping to his feet in excitement. “The Imperial military experimented extensively with pathogens, testing and deploying them against tens of thousands of prisoners and noncombatants. They developed the most advanced biological weapons of the war, bar none.”
Jonah paused, unable to quite articulate his next question in a way Hassan would answer. “But you just said this was a post-war facility.”
“The war ended,” Hassan said, “but the research didn’t. Imagine — Japan falls, coming under the military umbrella of the United States and her allies. But not all of the surrendered were resigned to the idea of Japan as a wholly disarmed client state. They were determined to find a way to protect themselves without a military.”
“So they turned to unconventional weapons.”
“Yes — and the effort could have been easily funded by powerful Japanese nationalists for decades, perhaps even to this day. Just look at these aluminum cisterns — the designs are clearly from the late ’60s, perhaps even early ’70s, decades after the war ended.”
Jonah looked closely at the tanks, but had no basis for verifying Hassan’s observations. “But if it was such an important program, why was the facility abandoned?”
“Japan’s post-war economic miracle?” Hassan said, venturing a guess. “I’m thinking rapid economic expansion and rebuilding throughout the 1950s set the stage for her ‘Golden Sixties’, and high-technology and automotive economy. Perhaps this facility became politically obsolete. Why continue to develop weapons of mass destruction if one could wield staggering economic power instead? I imagine any non-military innovations made by this laboratory were ultimately folded into Japan’s corporate research programs on the mainland. However, recent events would suggest a remnant of this clandestine organization continues to this day.”
Hassan joined Dalmar and Jonah as they walked out of the germ research laboratory. The lava tubes were a labyrinth; Jonah could barely keep his sense of direction.
“She’s this way,” said Hassan, leading the trio. He pointed toward a chamber at the end of a snaking, partially collapsed tunnel. Inside, Alexis worked intently over a dimly-lit metal workbench, while Marissa sat on a stool reading through the German doctor’s logbook. Jonah was glad to know where the logbook had ended up. All he’d known was that he woke up on the beach without it. Marissa must have noticed it and taken it out of his pants while he slept.
Alexis didn’t so much as look up from her work, just waved an acknowledgement as she heard the men come in. Sun-Hi briefly stuck her head out from behind a long bank of moldering reel-to-reel magnetic tape computers before returning to further disassemble the antique units.“Find anything interesting in the logbook?” asked Jonah.
“A little,” said Marissa. “My German sucks these days, but I can still read a bit. My guess is that you found a doctor’s campaign journal. Has entries on all the various complaints and illnesses faced by the crew. He seemed to have had a lot of down time. When nothing else was happening, he wrote a lot about his captain. I think they must have been friends. Beyond that, it’s mostly worrying about his wife and daughter back home.”
Another captain, another doctor, another time. “Any insights?”
“A lot of venereal disease,” said Marissa. “I mean, like a lot. And then it ends abruptly in May—”
“When the sub was presumably captured by the Japanese,” added Hassan.
“Can you blame them?” asked Jonah. “No way they’d let all that vital technology and war material surrender into Allied hands.”
“What did his last entry say? Any reference to possible hijackers?” said Hassan.
“No — but he was fixated on a finding the source of a mysterious illness that was affecting a couple of crewmen in the aft torpedo room.”
“What were the symptoms?”
“Nausea, diarrhea, headache, fatigue, bleeding gums, that kind of thing.”
“Gross,” said Alexis without looking up. The doctor squinted at the information, but didn’t say anything.