Kimura

The blessed rains came, reducing the raging fire to little tongues of flame, letting a tired band of women and children who mounted an ineffectual bucket brigade, along with one limping soldier, to return to whatever shelter they’d found for themselves. The soldier, his body misshapen by bandages under Navy fatigues, put his left arm back in the sling about his neck and headed for the base next door. For balance, he walked with the aid of a stout stick, his gait a sparing of healing leg wounds. Pausing in the freight yard to take a cigarette and match from beneath his strawboard raincoat, he snapped the match into life with a practiced flick of his thumbnail. “At least these chest bandages are good for something,” he said. “My cigarettes stayed dry.”

The tiny flare would have revealed him as young and good to look at, with unusually chiseled oriental features and intense and tired, brooding black eyes. Placing the cigarette firmly in a corner of his mouth to direct the smoke away from his tired eyes, he pushed an unruly strand of wet hair off the patch of forehead healing skin and set off again. Picking his way between muddy potholes and a clutter of twisted tracks, he tried to avoid the ones that threatened to topple him.

Only last year, they said, this had been a major staging area, a beehive of shipping activity. Under the wet sky, it was junkyard of looming ghostly shapes that in daylight showed themselves as piles of rotting cargo next to hulks of abandoned freight cars.

Captain Kiyoshi Kimura, for that was the limping man’s name, hated having to wait for anything. Rescued from a typhoon tossed Tokyo Bay three days earlier, last night he’d disobeyed the order to remain on the base, and joined the civilian Keibo dan to fight a fire caused by the latest Allied raid. The dock building was the only one still intact. And every man was forced to squeeze in it like sardines.

Please come today, Kimura prayed silently, and end this dreadful waiting. General Saito, the base Commandant, off in Tokyo at a War Guidance Council Meeting, had not been heard from for four days. And the men of this base kept upsetting Kimura with talk of a terrible new weapon that had decimated Nagasaki and Hiroshima, saying the scorched survivors resembled nothing so much as Kappa monsters, those mythical beings with blue black faces and mottled brown bodies!

General Saito will know if this is true. And he will surely send me home, or at least put me to some useful work. And we’ll talk. After the lonely months on the islands of the South Pacific, Kimura desperately needed to unburden himself. And who better to hear him out than the mentor he most revered?

He eyed the waning pink moon and decided it was nearly four a.m. Checking his watch for time was now a mere formality for Kimura. In those months when it came to mean the daily difference between life or death, his judgment of time had been honed to near certitude. Timing and preparation were his constant preachments to his demolition team. “Take due thought,” he told them over and over. “A careful mission is a successful mission. What we do requires the delicacy of a watchmaker, the strength of a Sumo wrestler, the discretion of a diplomat and the heart of a hero. But remember that a true patriot seeks neither rewards nor glory.”

Their diligence paid off. In the eighteen and a half months they dove about the island atolls and harbors of the South Pacific, the mines they planted had nearly crippled the enemy. Adept at sneaking behind enemy lines to set improvised booby traps, they’d never lost a man! Kimura smiled to himself as he limped along. A record to be proud of! Then he remembered Sanjuro, the exception, and frowned. Packing during a sudden summer squall, readying to be picked up by a submarine to take them from the atoll, Sanjuro had disappeared. His acts of foolish bravado had put the team in jeopardy more than once. Another man guilty of such flagrant disobedience would have been shipped home in disgrace. But he couldn’t make himself send Sanjuro Saito home to bring dishonor on his father, the general, the man Kimura most admired in all the world. Now back in Japan, how to tell the general that he had lost his son?