Linnear 01 - The Ninja (41 page)

Doc Deerforth eyed Nicholas as he brought the plates over to the table. ‘And you think this is what the ninja is doing?’

‘It seems logical, yes.’

Doc Deerforth began to eat, frowning in concentration. ‘You’ve thought of other possibilities, naturally,’ he said after a while.

Nicholas looked up. ‘What other possibilities?’

‘I don’t know. But they’re devious bastards. I could never pretend to know what was in their minds.’

Nicholas looked away for a moment. ‘I knew several in Japan.’

Doc Deerforth’s eyes blazed briefly. ‘Did you?’

‘That was years ago.’

‘Time doesn’t mean anything to them.’ Nicholas knew he was talking about his own experience. He put down his fork, said nothing. ‘They’re not human,’ Doc Deerforth said after a time. It was so quiet between the words that Nicholas could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall. ‘At least, there’s something quite inhuman about them - as if they were vampires or something. Something supernatural.’ His eyes had turned inwards as he strung out the banner of his memory.

‘Our war,’ he continued, ‘was quite different from any other, from what it was elsewhere. Where we were, it was never a matter of companies taking a ridge and holding it in the face of an enemy counter-offensive. There were no front lines, separate territories, retreats or attacks. There was only a kind of holding on. A desperate stubbornness against this terrible fluidity which brought you to the front in the morning and behind the enemy at sunset without having moved at all during the day.

‘We were never quite sure just where the enemy was. Specific orders were sporadic at best and, when they came, it seemed clear to us that the generals had no idea of the actual situation. We lived in a kind of loosely controlled state of anarchy. It was our only protection from the panic which continually besieged us.

‘The time I’m telling you about was late in the war. Almost all of us had been in the Pacific Theatre from the beginning. Many of us were in no condition to fight. Malaria, amoebic dysentery, those and other diseases I had never encountered before were what we lived with. But, after a while, we began to fear even the cholera less than the nights.

‘The nights brought the infiltrations, silent and lethal. We ‘seemed incapable of stemming them. We doubled the perimeter guard, began patrols of the compound itself. Nothing helped. The commander, in desperation, mounted a series of night patrols. They shot at shadows or the calls of night birds. They hit nothing and were, in turn, silently killed.

‘These incidents built themselves eerily. Then some idiot • mentioned Dracula. He had a dog-eared copy of the Bram Stoker novel and it quickly made the rounds. The fear magnified itself. What else could you expect under such circumstances? Man is notorious for inventing creatures to explain away the otherwise inexplicable. It was something out of a Gothic horror novel. Even now, with so much time in between, it doesn’t seem like a joke. We were used to fighting soldiers of flesh and blood, not shadows which melted away in the light. If we could have caught just one, even - caught a glimpse -we’d have had some idea of what we were up against.

‘Fear has an uncanny way of escalating. We were none of us cowards. We had all done our share of killing. Even I - even I had been called upon several times … We were in danger of being overrun. But now we were experiencing something else - something quite beyond our ken. It sounds foolish, I know, but believe me, Nicholas, when I tell you what happened…

‘We were struggling across Leyte. The enormous naval battle of Leyte Gulf was behind us. On the sea the Japanese were destroyed, but on land it was another matter entirely. We did not yet own this small island and Luzon, the main island, was still in Japanese hands. They were undermanned and frightfully undersupplied. We thought we had them beaten at Leyte Gulf; that it was the end. ‘It wasn’t.

‘A new Japanese commander had arrived from Tokyo just before the battle began. Vice-Admiral Onishi of the First Naval Air Fleet in Manila. Two days after he arrived, he travelled to Mabalacat, a small town fifty miles to the northwest. It was the site of the Two Hundred and First-Air Group. There he chaired a meeting that was, although none of us knew it then, one of the war’s most fateful conferences.

‘Not long after, we heard the first reports. Many of us, knowing the wildness of rumour, did not believe it. But then, no more than a week later, we saw it for ourselves. At first we thought the Zeros were after us but they screamed by overhead as if we had not existed. Then we saw our ships out to sea, an aircraft carrier and two destroyers. They did not strafe our ships, these Zeros, nor did they dive-bomb them. They merely careened into them. We were certain that the first one had been hit and crashed. But as they one after another followed the same suicidal course, we began to understand. Yet we understood not at all. How could rational men do this? It seemed inconceivable. We thought perhaps they had been brainwashed; the Japanese were notorious for their methods. Anyway, that was the prevailing opinion.

‘Yet something about this theory stuck in my mind. I could not believe it. Psychological reorientation takes time, I knew that. Certainly it could not have been accomplished overnight. It took time and that was the one thing the Japanese did not have. No, I was convinced it had to be something else. But what?

‘It was the season of rain; there seemed no dry ground on the whole of Leyte. We made progress but not without casualties, of course. One night the unit was forced to move on. There were a number of wounded who needed taking care of. I volunteered to stay behind for a short time so that I could bandage them properly. There was a relief column due in the morning. But the situation was far too volatile and my C.O. insisted I move out with the rest of the unit. We made camp just before dawn. Many of us were too tired to fall asleep. We sat around and talked about Dracula. Three men had been killed the night before; the vampire theories were at their height.

‘At last I left them, pitched my tent and crawled inside. For a time I could hear their voices as they continued to talk, then the sounds stopped. I wasn’t sure whether I had fallen asleep or they had just broken up for the night.

‘I was in that odd state between sleeping and wakefulness. I thought I dreamed someone was there, watching-me. I tried to wake myself but couldn’t. My head felt like it was too heavy to lift up. I strained but nothing happened. It was as if my consciousness had somehow been severed from the nerve impulses which mechanized the muscles. I wanted to look behind me, you know, over my head, certain that was where the danger was coming from. I could make no move.

‘Above me a face hovered in the air, disembodied. I don’t know when my eyes had actually opened or whether they had ever really been closed. My chest felt heavy and I seemed to have trouble breathing. I felt cold. Not as if the night was chill but from inside. I shivered.

“It was a Japanese face, coal-black as if it had been coated with charcoal or lampblack. It was dull so that no light would reflect off it. His eyes seemed very large. They had an odd light to them as if, while they stared right at me, they were focused on another universe. It was eerie. I had seen something like it once in a hospital when I was in my last year of medical school. We went into the psycho wing and I saw several patients. One was a young man, not far past twenty. His hair was cropped close. He had high cheekbones and a long thin nose. He could have been a scholar. He was in a strait jacket. I watched his eyes for a long time, while beside me the resident droned his spiel like a carnival barker. This man, this … creature was far beyond the supposedly modern and humane treatment the resident was describing in such loving detail. This man had reverted. He was certainly no longer human but had returned to the animal state of his ancestors. There was no hint of what we might term “intelligence” in his eyes; at least not as modern man defines intelligence. But I saw cunning there, of a kind and in a strength which terrified me. For a moment I fantasized what it would be like having this man loose in the world. Richard Speck? Gary Gil-more? Jack the Ripper? It was beyond imagining. For this was a man who was clearly beyond morality.

‘Now you know some of what I saw in the eyes hovering above me that night on Leyte. But not all. To call this “madness” would be to seriously underestimate it, for it was far more. Ours is a world of order, ruled by laws. From science to morality there are parameters within which we all live. This man did not. He lived outside time as if residing within him, lending him all its ferocious energy, was the essence of chaos. I don’t know how to describe it better, but seeing him thus in the flesh only underscored the fact rather than the fiction of his supernatural origins. Perhaps, after all, our vampire stories had not been so far off the mark. I know, I know, this all sounds rather fanciful - pulled out to give a good Gothic kick to this story. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

‘While I thought of all this, I felt his movement. He produced a matt black length of cloth and, folding it upon itself, wrapped it painfully tight across my mouth. He was quite close to me now and I saw that he was dressed all in black.

‘He hauled me out of the tent and, stooping, slung me over his shoulder.

‘He ran.

‘He ran without sound. No shadow trailed behind us; we were never in the light. He took a route out of the encampment that was neither direct nor circuitous. It was merely undetectable, as if he were following a path no one else suspected of being there, a path made just for him.

‘I didn’t struggle. I found myself wondering why I hadn’t been killed as the other victims of these silent infiltrations had been. I was amazed. Even upside down I could see well enough to know that he was a magician. No one I knew could possibly have got in and out of our encampment totally undetected as this man had. He moved without seeming motion. That must sound like a contradiction but it’s not. He ran with such fluidity that there was no up-and-down motion, merely the sensation of forward movement.

‘We were in the jungle now, travelling extremely quickly. In fact, even though the way was now more choked with foliage and underbrush, our speed actually increased. His strength and endurance were exceptional. We were totally alone in the world, or so it seemed to me. It was that time of the night when the nocturnal creatures have crawled back into their holes to sleep and the diurnal animals have not yet awakened. The jungle was quite still, just a sleepy bird calling here and there, the sounds quite isolated and seeming part of another world.

‘We travelled thus for perhaps thirty minutes. Then the man stopped abruptly and, spinning me off his shoulder, widened the cloth around my mouth so dial I was now blindfold also. He led me, stumbling, through the jungle. His fingers were at the back of my jacket so that, each time I fell, he suspended me as if I was hanging from a coat-hook. It was a terribly dehumanizing thing to do and I tried to shut my mind to it.

‘After a time I began to hear voices. I did not speak Japanese but I understood enough to get by; it was something

I did not want him to know. At length the blindfold was removed. We were in the midst of a Japanese camp. It wasn’t anything like what I had pictured. In fact, I was aghast; I thought for an instant that he had taken me to a hospital; it hardly seemed like a military camp at all. For one thing, most of the soldiers were either lying down or sitting. I saw no troops as such; no guards.

‘We were near the water, though on which side of the island I could not tell. I saw the water clearly through a gap in the vegetation. I watched for a time, totally unmolested, while the man who had brought me spoke with several of his fellows who were identically dressed. These seemed to be the only operational men in the camp. At first I tried to pay attention to what they were talking about, but they were either -speaking too fast or in some dialect I had never heard because I couldn’t understand-them.

‘Dawn had broken and there was a white line just above the horizon. I knew I must be looking east. I saw a smudge coming into view and then another simultaneously, I heard a heavy drone from the northwest, in the direction of Luzon. It was the Two Hundred and First. I looked up. The Zeros were black and bloated against the pale sky. The night’s clouds had melted away.

‘The Zeros passed low over us, headed out to sea, towards the dark smudges containing the horizon, coming closer. ‘ “You know they go to attack your ships.” ‘I started. A thin Japanese stood beside me. He was on crutches. His left trouser-leg was pinned back at the knee but he’d surely die of malnutrition before his stump would begin to bother him.

‘ “You speak English very well,” I said. ‘ “Yes.” He was still staring out at the moving targets as they closed with one another. “They will not come back. None of them. Onishi has seen to that.” I understand that he meant the new Vice-Admiral. He shook his head sadly. “They say, you know, that he helped Yamamoto plan the Pearl Harbor attack.” He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “It’s hard to believe. It seems so long ago.” His head turned. “Do you speak Japanese?. No? Pity.” He turned back. The

Zeros were nearing our ships. You could see the batteries begin to fire. Black clouds with orange bits in their centres exploded, eerily silent until, moments later, the reports found us, shook the air. “No, they won’t come back, those boys. They’re on a one-way mission.”

‘Abruptly, his words penetrated the fog which had surrounded me since I had come into the camp. “Do you mean to tell me,” I exclaimed, “that they’re on suicide missions? The plane and the pilot…?”

‘ “One big maneuverable bomb, yes.” The Japanese stood quite still. Tears seemed to be standing in the corners of his eyes but there was no change in his voice. “Vice-Admiral Onishi’s idea. It’s a desperation move. He had a time convincing the others but he managed it.” He said something in Japanese which I took to be a curse. “Not enough of us have died for this ‘noble cause’. The Emperor still sends his sons into a war which we have already lost.” Far away, on the white and black horizon, the Zeros were leaving the sky. ^_There came a sharp call from behind me. I did not need to understand the language to know that my captor wanted me. I walked away from the crippled soldier, saying, “You ought to get something to eat.”