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war was over, and I was sent back to Tokyo, I spent days reading everything I
could on ancient Shinto rituals and Japanese demonology. But who knows? The
human mind and the human physique are capable of extraordinary things under
stress, and in conditions of trance or religious ecstasy. The members of the
Pentecostal Holiness Church in Kentucky drink strychnine and burn
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their feet with blazing torches, just to show that the Lord will protect them
against harm. I saw a fire-walk myself in Polynesia, when a man walked twenty
yards over white-hot coals with bare feet and appeared to be unscathed. You
think to yourself, are these people really possessed by angels, or devils, or
are they simply using their ordinary human capabilities to the
utmost something which most of us rarely do?"
Nancy said nothing, but waited for Jerry to continue. It was growing dark
outside, and somewhere in that darkness David was being held captive, for a
ransom which amounted to nothing less than Jerry's own life. The thought was
clinging around his mind like a tangle of barbed wire, and already his
emotions and his desperate love for David were scratched and bleeding and raw.
' They parachuted six of us into the Chugoku Sanchi at night, with a
high-power Stromberg wireless receiver and enough food to last us for a week.
We set up three base camps in the mountains and trekked from one to the other,
listening at each one to the military and code messages that the Japanese were
putting out from Hiroshima. Most of the wireless traffic was routine which
ships were docking, how many troops were being embarked for where, how much
ammunition was available, what their civil-defense plans were in case of an
American assault. But after three days we picked up a different batch of
signals from the center of the city, from a building which we pinpointed on
our street plans, by simple triangulation, near a bridge across the Ota River.
All the signals were related to what they called the Tengus, the devil-people.
We listened for four days and four nights, and by the end of that time we were
absolutely certain that it was right there, in that building in Hiroshima,
that the Hogs were being trained."
Jerry came away from the window and sat down again. Nancy poured him another
drink, and watched him with caution and sympathy. It was clear from the look
in his eyes that he had relived those wartime days in Japan over
and over again, dreaming and awake, and that he would carry the responsibility
for what he had done forever.
"They had briefed me, before I was dropped into Japan, that if I found the
place where the Hogs were being created, I was going to be giving the
President the go-ahead to use a completely new type of bomb, an incredibly
devastating firebomb, they told me, which would instantly incinerate the Hogs
and give them no chance of survival whatever. They had Japanese experts
helping the U.S. Intelligence Commands experts in Japanese demonology, as I
later found out and it was the opinion of these advisers that the only way in
which the Tengus could be eradicated without any fear of their revival would
be to vaporize them with an atomic bomb. You know the legends, I expect. If a
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Tengu is chopped to pieces, even one piece, on its own, remains capable of
independent life. And so nothing could remain. Not even a fingernail.
"Well, I was sure that I had found the place. Every signal confirmed it. I
radioed a message to the USS Value, which was waiting off Mi-Shima in the Sea
of Japan, and the Value, in turn, relayed the message to the U.S. Pacific
Fleet. President Truman Was at Yalta at the time, with Stalin and Churchill.
They gave him the message, and he said go. The official justification was
that, if America had the means to bring the war to a swift conclusion, she
ought to do so, which as far as it went was quite true. But what they omitted
to tell the public and the press was that two or three thousand Tengus could
have held up the American advance for five or six years, even longer; and that
General MacArthur had already expressed the opinion in a confidential
memorandum to President Truman that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would
cost an un-acceptably high number of American casualties. That is, unless the
Tengus were eliminated, totally."
"Which is what you justifiably did," said Nancy.
"Yes," Jerry agreed. "But when I confirmed the position of the Tengu training
center, right in the middle of Hiroshima, among ten square kilometers of
wooden
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houses, I didn't understand that our 'incredibly devastating firebomb' was
going to be an atomic bomb. I didn't understand that, for the sake of killing
three or four hundred fanatical young Japanese soldiers, we were going to wipe
out eighty thousand men, women, and children in the space of a split second,
and that another sixty thousand were going to die of radioactivity within a
year."
He was silent for a very long while. Then he said, "I didn't know."
"And if-you had known?" asked Nancy.
Again he was silent. "I'm not sure," he replied at last. "When you're in a
war, everything looks different. I lost all five of the men who were with me.
We got caught in crossfire on the beach at Kokubu, when the landing craft
tried to pick us up. Japanese Coast Guardsmen, most of them not much more than
sixteen and seventeen years old. They caught us like ducks on a pond. I only
got away because I could swim. Five men lost out of six, and I thought it was
a massacre.
"Then I heard that they'd dropped the atomic bomb. Compared to that, my
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