“What’s that noise?” he said sharply.
I didn’t hear anything unusual, but Thompson nodded. “Japanese cruiser. Getting closer.”
Long moments passed while the rest of us heard the low muffled grumble of an engine. Thompson put the tiller over—
A curling white wave washed over the bow and stopped us dead. The mainsail flapped and then backed. Foaming water dripped over the canvas decking into my lap; Tom snatched up his shoulder bag to keep it from getting soaked. A cone of white light appeared in the fog. Our boat rocked at the bottom of this blinding cone, and one edge of the lit fog revealed the bulk of a tall ship, a black shape rumbling beside us, hardly seeming to move with the swell. My heart raced as I took all this in; I braced myself against Tom, looking at him fearfully. We were caught!
“Radar,” Tom whispered.
“Put down your sail,” a voice shouted. “Everyone stand with hands on head.” The voice was mechanically amplified (as I learned later) and it had a metallic ring to it that made me cringe with fear. “You are under arrest.”
I looked aft. Lee, all glare and black shadow in the searchlight’s powerful whiteness, was aiming a rifle at the top of the cone. Crack! The light above us burst and went dark in a tinkling of glass. Immediately the stern of our boat was spitting fire, for every man back there was shooting up at the Japanese ship. Tom pulled me down, the gunfire was a continuous banging, overwhelmed by a great BOOM, and suddenly the front of the sloop was gone. Broken planks and cold seawater poured up the boat over us. “Help!” I cried, freeing my feet from the tangle of rope. I was making my way over the canted gunwale when the mast fell on me.
After that, I don’t remember much. Searchlights breaking inside my eyelids. Choking on brine. Confused shouts, rough hands pulling me and hurting my armpits. Being hauled up metal steps and bumping my knees painfully. Choking and gasping, vomiting water. A metal deck, a coarse dry blanket.
I was on the Japanese ship.
When I realized this—it was the first thought I had, as I regained consciousness and saw the studded gray metal decking under my nose—I struggled to escape the hands holding me. Nothing doing. Hands restrained me, voices spoke nonsense at me: mishi kawa tonatu ka, and the like, on and on. “Help!” I cried. But my head was clearing, and I knew there was no help for me there. The suddenness of it all kept me from feeling it properly. I shivered and choked as if I’d been walloped in the stomach, but the real extent of the disaster was just sinking in as the Japanese sailors began to strip my wet clothes from me and wrap me in blankets. One was pulling my shirt sleeve down my arm; I twisted my hand out of it and fisted him in the nose. He squawked with surprise. I took a good swing and caught another one on the side of the head, and then started kicking wildly. I got some of them pretty good. They ganged up on me and carried me through a doorway into a glass-walled room at the back of the bow deck. Put me down on a bench that followed the curve of the hull.
Up in the bow I could see sailors still searching the water, shining a new searchlight this way and that, and shouting into an amplifying box. Two of them stood behind a giant gun on a thick stand—no doubt the gun that had demolished our sloop. The ship vibrated with the hum of engines, but we drifted over the swells, going nowhere. At our height above the water the fog was impenetrable. They had little motor dinghies down there searching, puttering about in the murk, but I could tell by their voices that they weren’t finding anything.
They had killed my old friend Tom. The thought made me cry, and once I started I sobbed and sobbed. All those years he had survived everything, every danger imaginable—only to get drowned by a miserable shore patrol. And all so fast.
After what seemed a long time, the men searching the water were ready to quit. I had pretty well recovered my wits, and some of my warmth, for the blankets were thick. I felt cold inside, though, cold in my heart. I was going to make these men pay for killing Tom. Tom hadn’t seemed too sure about the American resistance, but I was definitely part of it now, I thought to myself—starting right then and there, and for the rest of my life. In my cold heart I made a vow.
A door in the back wall of the glassed in room opened, and through it walked the captain of the ship. Maybe he was the captain and maybe he wasn’t, but there were gold tags on the shoulders of his new brown coat, and the coat had gold buttons. His face and hands were a shade darker than the coat, and his face looked like the faces of the bodies that washed up on our beach. Japanese, I had learned to call him. Two more officers, wearing brown suits without the gold shoulder tags or the buttons, stood behind him, their faces like masks.
Murderers, all of them. I stared fiercely at the captain, and he looked back, his eyes expressionless behind hanging upper eyelids. The room pitched gently, and fog pressed against the dripping salt-encrusted windows, fog that looked red because of the little red light set over the door.
“How do you feel?” the captain said in English that was clear, but lilting in a way I’d never heard before.
I stared at him.
“Have you recovered from the blow to your head?”
I stared at him some more.
After a time he nodded. I’ve seen his face more than once since then, in dreams: his eyes dark brown, almost black; deep lines in his skin, extending from the outside corners of his eyes in fans around the side of his head; black hair cut so close to his scalp that it had the texture of a brush. His lips were thin and brown, and now they were turned down with displeasure. He looked devilish, taken all together, and I struggled to look unconcerned as I stared at him, because he scared me.
“You appear to have recovered.” One of his officers gave him a thin board, to which sheets of paper were clipped. He took a pencil from the clip. “Tell me, young sir, what is your name?”
“Henry. Henry Aaron Fletcher.”
“Where do you come from?”
“America,” I said, and glared at each of them in turn. “The United States of America.”
The captain glanced at his officers. “Good show,” he said to me.
A gang of regular sailors in blue coats came in from the bow and jabbered at him. He sent them back to the bow, and turned to me again.
“Do you come from San Diego? San Clemente? Newport Beach?” I didn’t answer, and he continued: “San Pedro? Santa Barbara?”
“That’s way north,” I said scornfully. Shouldn’t have spoken, I thought. But I wanted to tear into him so bad I was shaking—shaking with fright, too—and I couldn’t help talking.