Dragon of the Mangrooves (11 page)

Murakami was a decent, clever man who could speak Burmese as fluently as Superior Private Yoshioka, who was waiting for their return in Uga.

“Go and ask the locals the way around the enemies. Be sure not to arouse suspicion,” Sumi told them.

Pondgi and Murakami left their rifles and trod on toward the houses. The rest of men hid in a grove nearby and waited. Although they disguised themselves, the big body of nine men was conspicuous in the remote farm. As a group, they always ran the risk of inviting the locals’ suspicions.

Dense forests had hindered them from seeing far away. It was a little hard to locate their present position, but Sumi estimated it at five kilometers due south of Ramree Town. Yanthitgyi, their current destination, lay about twenty kilometers north of the town. The shortest course was to pass through and then go due north. But the enemies might have utilized the town as a depot. If they dared to go straight through, he had better consider the possibility of skirmishes.

On the other hand, a detour into the hills was also available. He could head west for Payadgi Plain, then turn northward to thread through the forests. This course would make it possible for them to cross Payadgi-Ramree Road at its bot-tleneck in the hills. It was safer but would take much more time. He needed to choose which course they would take soon.

After a while, the two came back, and Pondgi had a long face. He looked at Sumi for some time, and didn’t say a word until Sumi grabbed him by the sleeve.

“There are plenty of Engli. It’s so bad, Master Sumi.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

Sumi turned to Murakami. “They say both the town and the road are full of enemies,” replied Murakami.

Sumi sighed and snapped, “Don’t repeat the same thing. Oh, come on! Give me a more specific report.”

Murakami straightened himself up and reported, “One of the locals said that when he went to the town yesterday, he saw many Engli with several tens of tanks and trucks there. My personal estimate, based on the conversation, is that the enemy should be about two-battalion strength. Maybe Indians. And I think the tanks were M3 middle, sir. The local told me more. They should be doing some extension work on Payadgi-Ramree Road.”

Sumi dropped his head. It was much more than expected. He felt foolish to think about engineering a fight against such an enemy. Going through Ramree Town was an impossible task.

Murakami continued, “The local says that if we go straight north along the footpath in the middle of the hamlet, we can get to the town. It’s six or seven kilometers away.”

This coincided with his estimate on the whole. Relieved a little, Sumi looked up to find Sergeant Shimizu with a serious look. “We’d better wait for night and force through the town. Maybe the enemies are off their guard because they are confident in their numbers,” Shimizu said in a decisive tone of voice. But Sumi rejected his opinion flatly.

“That plan won’t work. What do you do if they’re on their guard? We’ll be bugs to the flame on a summer night.”

He had already made up his mind. Only a detour would go well. He wouldn’t want his name added to a KIA list this early in the mission. Checking the map again, he chose to take the path to Payadgi. Shimizu laughed sardonically, showing open discontent, but the other soldiers quietly followed their commander.

Sumi and his men entered the jungle again after they had threaded along the paddies for some time. Wielding billhooks, they pushed through many bushes.

Before long, they managed to find a game trail taking them further into a deep forest. Interlocking branches cast dismal shadows on the ground there. The forest was dark and silent.

The trail merged in a meandering forestry road right around where the undergrowth had faded. It should be one of the roads descending to Payadgi Plain.

Sumi kept walking ahead of the party. While they cleared several ridges, he found their line extending too far from him. Some fatigued men couldn’t keep pace, despite the urging voice of Shimizu. Sumi stopped and turned back.

Having just gone over a small ridge, he couldn’t see the tail of his troop. He was missing five figures, including Shimizu.

Suddenly the sound of automatic rifle fire rang out. A moment later, the familiar cracks of their model thirty-eight 6.5-millimeter rifle followed. The reverberating din of gunfire disturbed and superseded the stillness of the forest.

“Hey! What’s the matter? Report!”

Sumi drew his Nambu fourteen and agilely cocked its slide to send the first cartridge into the chamber. Each soldier around him also jumped into the woods beside the road and held his rifle at the ready, hiding behind a nearby tree trunk or a stump. As soon as Sumi rushed to the ridge, Superior Private Morioka appeared from the opposite side and came slithering down the slope.

Sumi asked, “What happened?”

“They got Murakami!” Morioka said, gasping.

“What? Oh, shit!”

“Engli white men shot us from behind out of the blue. Now we are fighting them under Sarge’s command.”

“Hold, Morioka,” Sumi said. “How many are there?”

“Not so many. Maybe four or five, Lieutenant. All are hiding in this woods on our left. One of them shouted, ‘Japas-Azea,’ or something.”

“What’s that mean?”

Sumi’s mind whirred. Assuming that the word was English, “Japas-Azea” sounded like, “Japs are there.” The man must have hollered in English that he had found Japanese soldiers. He must be British. Sumi wondered why their true identities had been disclosed so easily in spite of the disguise, but it was no time to indulge himself in that thought process. Fortunately, the enemy was small in number. He couldn’t allow them to return to their unit, since they had seen them.

“Envelop them and wipe them out! Tell Sarge not to miss even one of them. Go!”

The moment Morioka turned back, Sumi faced Lance Corporal Yoshitake, the best shot in the party, and pointed to the left woods. “Cut off their retreat, Yoshitake. Don’t let them out alive!”

“Yes, sir!” Yoshitake responded and went slithering along the slope beside the road with a Sten gun under his arm.

Sumi hurriedly called a first class private named Arima, who had been a bear and deer hunter in their homeland. Those British soldiers might be tougher than his usual game animals, but Sumi expected that Arima would be better than others in a forest battle.

“You go too, Arima! Cover Yoshitake’s flank. Got it?” Sumi ordered. While he shouted out, the echo of gunfire never left the dark forest. Having seen Yoshitake and Arima vanish into the woods, Sumi rushed to the ridge again. Hitting the dirt there and hiding himself behind the edge, he peeped over the other side. At first he could see Murakami lying on the road. Next he saw Morioka rapid-firing his rifle by manipulating the bolt dexterously. Other guys were missing; they might be crawling in the woods. Searching for the enemy, he released the safety of his Nambu fourteen. Then he felt some discomforting acid surge up from the bottom of his stomach.

Abruptly, things had become very serious, with hostile soldiers face-to-face, forcing a shoot-out. It was the worst event that had ever happened in his whole life. He had no combat or open warfare experience. Although he had ordered envelopment for the present, he couldn’t think of anything to do beyond that.

His ability to think was paralyzed by fright and confusion. Everything was an awful mess, just as he had feared. Disgusted, he clicked his tongue; the sourness welled up in his mouth again. Strangely this tasted like soda water. It reminded him of a flavor of soda pop he had drank with Yukiko.

During summers, he and Yukiko would drop in a sightseers’ teahouse neighboring their university in Kyoto. The couple sat on their favorite bench, side by side, and ordered soda pop. She laughed every time she saw Sumi choke when he dared to drain the bottle in one gulp. While they listened to the song of cicadas there in the shadow of green trees, he often felt as if time had stopped.

He remembered the cool refreshing sound of a glass marble rolling in the soda bottle and Yukiko’s laughter and her carefree, girlish, smiling face. For a fraction of a second, he wondered if he would ever see her again.

A short shriek went up, and Sumi saw a British soldier with an automatic rifle in his hands fall between the trees beside the forestry road. Shortly thereafter, noisy consecutive pops of Sten gun fire reverberated in the woods. The blast of a grenade followed.

When its resonance had faded, a dead silence replaced it. Before long, Pondgi stood up timidly in the undergrowth.

Hiding himself behind trees one after another, Sumi went forward and shouted out, “Did you wipe them out?”

Shimizu’s voice came, “Yeah, we got three! But one rat has run away over there!”

Just then, Arima replied from inside the woods, “I brought him down just now, Sarge! All enemies cleared!”

A slight breeze rose and carried the faint smell of powder smoke back to Sumi.

Again the stillness of the woods deepened after the battle. Members of the rescue party came out by ones and twos and gathered on the road. The soldiers had fanned out effectively and given the British a fusillade, as commanded by Shimizu. As for the enemy soldier escaping inside the woods, Yoshitake had successfully mowed him down with the Sten gun when Arima’s grenade gave him a finishing blow. Murakami was the only Japanese casualty.

Sumi looked for him at once. Shimizu had been kneeling down beside

Murakami. He shook his head when he saw Sumi approaching. Shot in the chest, Murakami had already passed away. Sumi stood blankly, pitifully dazzled by the whiteness of Murakami’s shirt, on which a round red spot had spread.

Murakami’s death made everyone feel depressed. Shimizu contracted his brows into a frown. His face showed a clear sign of distrust in Sumi’s leadership and that Sumi was responsible for the death of his comrade. He spat on the grass at the roadside and groaned. “Damn it! What a mess! Even though I was with him…”

Indifferent to Sumi, who had lost the power of speech, Shimizu went on.

“However deep we may hide ourselves inside a mountain on the sly, the enemies come when they need to, Lieutenant. You didn’t watch it since you’d gone ahead, but these bastards came at us from behind. They came suddenly, without any sounds, you know? It was a kind of ambush. The enemy might have already sniffed out our plan. Don’t you think so?”

Cross-examined, Sumi couldn’t be silent any more. “I don’t know, but it’s to your credit, having finished them all, Sarge.”

Sumi felt wretched and disgusted to have said something obsequious and soothing.

As Shimizu said, Sumi didn’t watch the entire battle, and he wondered if they had really finished them all. If even one man had slipped away, he would report their activity to his unit.

Sumi hastily ordered the soldiers in a loud voice. “Divide up and search for footprints now. Make sure we know how many there were.”

It seemed easy to investigate because the soil of the woods was damp, in spite of the dry season. Sumi’s men reported back that the enemy had been a four-man-party, all dead for sure, and they found no trace of runaways.

Sumi heaved a sigh of relief. But if the enemy detected his rescue party by intercepting a radio transmission or something and dispatched these four in pursuit, it would be the worst situation. He worried about what would become of them.

They lined up the remains of the four on the roadside. Each wore the distinctive British uniform, and ammunition pouches were attached on the breasts.

Their badges showed that one was a NCO and the others were privates. Sumi examined their belongings.

He found a photo in a pocket of the NCO. This freckled, big guy, a young woman with fair hair that seemed to be his wife, and two cute, little girls were all smiling at a ranch, somewhere in England probably. Both girls were about five years old or so, and one of them also had freckles. The family portrait looked merry and happy. They deserved his sympathy.

However, if they had caught the NCO alive, they couldn’t have taken him with them, for fear that at any moment he would escape and report their activity.

Even if they had been able to turn him in to Japanese military police, no one could have guaranteed that the MPs wouldn’t torture him and make him a live target for a bayonet practice. For his bereaved family, this might seem like the deed of devils. But he and his compatriots had burned many Japanese patients alive in the field hospital that couldn’t evacuate from the battlefield of Kohima and had just killed Murakami here. All compassion was useless. It was too late for pity after the war broke out. The chain of hate had already long since linked up.

Trying to keep his mind detached, Sumi continued the inspection but couldn’t find anything like a directive or an operation map. There was no evidence they had gained information about the rescue party.

However, he thought it too early to feel reassured, because he still didn’t understand how the British could have found them. He asked Shimizu about their respective positions before the battle and figured out that Murakami, who had casually carried his model thirty-eight cavalry carbine, had been on the end of the line. Sumi guessed that his rifle might have attracted the attention of the British, who had caught up with Murakami.

But Sumi doubted it soon, telling himself, “Could they tell the difference between rifles from a distance? Wasn’t a man with a Japanese rifle always a Japanese soldier, even if they could?”

Then he happened to look at Murakami’s feet and was astonished. Despite Sumi’s order to disguise himself as a Burmese, Murakami had worn a pair of rubber-soled canvas tabi, traditional footwear made with a split between the big toe and the second toe, with wrapped puttees under his lungi. He might have thought it convenient for mountain walking. Sumi deduced that the very characteristic Japanese footgear had no doubt attracted a quick British eye.

Though they were Asians, the Burmese or Gurkhas didn’t wear those shoes.

“Why didn’t I see this before? Had I checked their disguises more thoroughly, it might not have happened. Was it an avoidable death?” Sumi said to himself, suffering badly from guilt.