Before any engineering can be done, all of this wilderness must be brought into the realm of the known. Detailed maps must be prepared, watersheds charted, soil sampled. For two weeks Goto Dengo has been going around with a pipe and a sledgehammer taking core samples of the dirt. He has identified rocks from the streambeds, estimated the flow rates of the Yamamoto and Tojo Rivers, counted and catalogued trees. He has trudged through the jungle and planted flags around the approximate boundaries of the Special Security Zone. The whole time, he’s been worrying about having to perform the survey himself, using primitive, improvised tools. And all of a sudden, here is Lieutenant Ninomiya with his instruments.
The three Lieutenants, Goto, Mori, and Ninomiya, spend a few days surveying the flat, semi-open land straddling the lower Tojo River. The year, 1944, is turning out to be dry so far, and Mori does not want to construct his military barracks on land that will turn into a marsh after the first big rain. He is not concerned about the comfort of the prisoners, but he would at least like to ensure that they won’t get washed away. The lay of the land is also important in setting up the interlocking fields of fire that will be necessary to put down any riots or mass escape attempts. They put Bundok’s few enlisted men to work gathering bamboo stakes, then drive these in to mark the locations of roads, barracks, barbed-wire fences, guard towers, and a few carefully sited mortar emplacements from which the guards will be able to fill the atmosphere in any chosen part of the camp with shrapnel.
When Lieutenant Goto takes Lieutenant Ninomiya up into the jungle, clambering up the steep valley of the Tojo, Lieutenant Mori must stay behind—in accordance with Captain Noda’s orders. This is just as well, since Mori has his work cut out for him down below. The captain has granted Ninomiya a special dispensation to see the Special Security Zone.
“Elevations are of supreme importance in this project,” Goto Dengo tells the surveyor on the way up. They are burdened with surveying equipment and fresh water, but Ninomiya clambers up the rocky gulch of the half-parched river just as ably as Goto Dengo himself. “We will begin by establishing the level of Lake Yamamoto—which does not exist yet—and then work downwards from there.”
“I have also been ordered to obtain the precise latitude and longitude,” says Ninomiya.
Goto Dengo grins. “That’s hard—there is nowhere to see the sun.”
“What about the three peaks?”
Goto Dengo turns to see if Ninomiya is joking. But the surveyor is looking intently up the valley.
“Your dedication sets a good example,” Goto Dengo says.
“This place is paradise compared to Rabaul.”
“Is that where you were sent from?”
“Yes.”
“How did you escape? It is cut off, isn’t it?”
“It has been cut off for some time,” Ninomiya says curtly. Then, he adds: “They came and got me in a submarine.” His voice is husky and faint.
Goto Dengo is silent for a while.
Ninomiya has a system all worked out in his head, which they put into effect the next week, after they have done a rough survey of the Special Security Zone. Early in the morning, they hoist an enlisted man into a tree with a canteen, a watch, and a mirror. There is nothing special about this tree except for a bamboo stake recently driven into the ground nearby, labeled MAIN DRIFT.
Then Lieutenants Ninomiya and Goto climb to the top of the mountain, which takes them about eight hours. It is dreadfully arduous, and Ninomiya is shocked that Goto volunteers to go with him. “’I want to see this place from the top of Calvary,” Goto Dengo explains. “Only then will I have the insight to perform my duty well.”
On the way up, they compare notes, New Guinea vs. New Britain. It seems that the latter’s only saving grace is the settlement of Rabaul, a formerly British port complete with a cricket oval, now the linchpin of Nipponese forces in Southwest Asia. “For a long time it was a great place to be a surveyor,” Ninomiya says, and describes the fortifications that they built there in preparation for MacArthur’s invasion. He has a draftsman’s enthusiasm for detail and at one point talks nonstop for an hour describing a particular system of bunkers and pillboxes down to the last booby trap and glory hole.
As the climb gets harder, the two vie with each other in belittling its difficulty. Goto Dengo tells the tale of climbing over the snow-covered mountain range in New Guinea.
“Nowadays, on New Britain we climb volcanoes all the time,” Ninomiya says offhandedly.
“Why?”
“To collect sulfur.”
“Sulfur? Why?”
“To make gunpowder.”
After this they don’t talk for a while.
Goto Dengo tries to dig them out of a conversational hole. “It’ll be a bad day for MacArthur when he tries to take Rabaul!”
Ninomiya trudges along silently for a bit, trying to control himself, and fails. “You idiot,” he says, “don’t you see? MacArthur isn’t coming. There’s no need.”
“But Rabaul is the cornerstone of the whole theater!”
“It is a cornerstone of soft, sweet wood in a universe of termites,” Ninomiya snaps. “All he has to do is ignore us for another year, and then everyone will be dead of starvation or typhus.”
The jungle thins out. The plants are wrestling for footholds on a loose slope of volcanic cinders, and only smaller ones endure. This puts Goto Dengo in the mind of writing a poem in which the small, tenacious Nipponese prevail over the big, lumbering Americans, but it has been a long time since he wrote a poem and he can’t make the words go together.
Someday the plants will turn this cone of scoria and rub ble into soil, but not yet. Now that Goto Dengo can finally see for more than a few yards he is beginning to understand the lay of the land. The numerical data that he and Ninomiya have compiled over the last week is being synthesized, within his mind, into a solid understanding of how this place works.
Calvary is an old cinder cone. It started as a fissure from which ash and scoria were ejected, one fragment at a time, for thousands of years, tumbling up and outwards in a family of mortar-shell-like parabolic curves, varying in height and distance depending on the size of each fragment and the direction of the wind. They landed in a wide ring centered on the fissure. As the ring grew in height it naturally spread out into a broad, truncated cone with a central pit gouged out of its top, with the spitting fissure in the bottom of that pit.
The winds here tend to come from a little bit east of due south, and so the ash tended to be pushed towards the north-by-northwest edge of the cone’s rim. That is still the highest point of the cinder cone. But the fissure died out eons ago, or perhaps was plugged by its own emissions, and the whole structure has been much eroded since then. The southern rim of the cone is just a barrier of low hills perforated by the courses of the Yamamoto River and the two tributaries that come together to form the Tojo River. The central pit is a bowl of loathsome jungle, so saturated with chlorophyll that it looks black from above. Birds cruise above the canopy, looking like colored stars from up here.
The northern rim still rises a good five hundred meters above the bowl of jungle, but its formerly smooth arc has been dissected by erosion to form three distinct summits, each one a pile of red scoria half-concealed by a stubble of green vegetation. Without discussion, Ninomiya and Goto Dengo head for the one in the middle, which is the highest. They reach it at about two-thirty in the afternoon, and immediately wish they hadn’t because the sun is beating almost straight down on top of them. But there is a cool breeze up here, and once they have protected their heads with makeshift burnooses, it’s not so bad. Goto Dengo sets up the tripod and the transit while Ninomiya uses his sex tant to shoot the sun. He has a pretty good German watch which he zeroed against the radio transmission from Manila this morning, and this enables him to reckon the longitude. He works the calculation out on a scrap of paper on his lap, then goes back and does it again to double-check the numbers, speaking them out loud. Goto Dengo copies the
m down in his notebook, just in case Ninomiya’s notes get lost.
At three o’clock sharp, the enlisted man down in the tree begins to flash his mirror at them: a brilliant spark from a dark rug of jungle that is otherwise featureless. Ninomiya centers his transit on this signal and takes down more figures. In combination with various other data from maps, aerial photos, and the like, this should enable him to make an estimate of the main shaft’s latitude and longitude.
“I don’t know how accurate this will be,” he frets, as they trudge down the mountain. “I have the peak exactly—what did you call it? Cavalry?”
“Close enough.”
“This means soldiers on horseback, correct?”
“Yes.”
“But the site of the shaft I will not have very precisely unless I can use better techniques.”
Goto Dengo considers telling him that this is perfectly all right, that the place was made to be lost and forgotten. But he keeps his mouth shut.
The survey work takes another couple of weeks. They figure out where the shore of Lake Yamamoto will be and calculate its volume. It will be more of a pond than a lake—less than a hundred meters across—but it will be deceptively deep, and it will hold a lot of water. They calculate the angle of the shaft that will connect the bottom of the lake to the main network of tunnels. They figure out where all of the horizontal tunnels will emerge from the walls of the Tojo River’s gorge, and stake out the routes of roads and railways that will lead to those openings, so that debris can be removed and precious war material brought in for storage. They double- and triple-check all of it to make sure that no fragment of the works will be visible from the air.
Meanwhile, down below, Lieutenant Mori and a small work detail have planted some fenceposts and strung some barbed wire—just enough to contain a hundred or so prisoners, who arrive packed into a couple of military trucks. When these are put to work, the camp expands very rapidly; the military barracks go up in a few days and the double barbed-wire perimeter is completed. They never seem to lack for supplies here. Dynamite comes in by the truckload, as if it weren’t desperately needed in places like Rabaul, and is carefully stored under the supervision of Goto Dengo. Prisoners carry it into a special shed that has been constructed for this purpose in the shade of the jungle. Goto Dengo has not been close to the prisoners before, and is startled to realize that they are all Chinese. And they are not speaking the dialect of Canton or of Formosa, but rather one that Goto Dengo heard frequently when he was posted in Shanghai. These prisoners are northern Chinese.
It is stranger and stranger all the time, this Bundok place.
The Filipinos, he knows, have been uniquely surly about their inclusion in the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere. They are well-armed, and MacArthur has been egging them on. Many thousands of them have been taken prisoner. Within half a day’s drive of Bundok there are more than enough Filipino prisoners to fill Lieutenant Mori’s camp and accomplish Lieutenant Goto’s project. And yet the powers that be have shipped hundreds of Chinese people all the way down from Shanghai to do this work.
At times like this he begins to doubt his own sanity. He feels an urge to discuss the matter with Lieutenant Ninomiya. But the surveyor, his friend and confidant, has made himself scarce since his work was completed. One day, Goto Dengo goes by Ninomiya’s tent and finds it empty. Captain Noda explains that the surveyor was called away suddenly to perform important work elsewhere.
About a month later, when the road-building work in the Special Security Zone is well underway, some of the Chinese workers who are digging begin shouting excitedly. Goto Dengo understands what they are saying.
They have uncovered human remains. The jungle has done its work and practically nothing is left but bones, but the smell, and the legions of ants, tell him that the corpse is a fairly recent one. He grabs a shovel from one of the workers and pulls up a scoop of dirt and carries it over to the river, dripping tangles of ants. He lowers it carefully into the running water. The dirt dissolves into a brown trail in the river and the skull is soon revealed: the dome of the head, the eye sockets still not entirely empty, the nasal bone with some fragments of cartilage still attached, and finally the jaws, pocked with old abscesses and missing most of their teeth, except for one gold tooth in the middle. The current turns the skull over slowly, as if Lieutenant Ninomiya is hiding his face in shame, and Goto Dengo sees a neat hole punched through the base of the skull.
He looks up. A dozen Chinese are gathered above him on the riverbank, watching him impassively.
“Do not speak of this to any of the other Nipponese,” Goto Dengo says. Their eyes go wide and their lips part in astonishment as they hear him speaking the precise dialect of Shanghai prostitutes.
One of the Chinese workers is nearly bald. He seems to be in his forties, though prisoners age rapidly and so it is always difficult to tell. He is not scared like the others. He is looking at Goto Dengo appraisingly.
“You,” Goto Dengo says, “pick two other men and follow me. Bring shovels.”
He leads them into the jungle, into a place where he knows there will be no further digging, and shows them where to put Lieutenant Ninomiya’s new grave. The bald man is a good leader as well as a strong worker and he gets the grave dug quickly, then transfers the remains without squeamishness or complaint. If he has been through the China Incident and survived for this long as a prisoner of war, he has probably seen and done much worse.
Goto Dengo does his part by distracting Captain Noda for a couple of hours. They go up and tour the dam work on the Yamamoto River. Noda is anxious to create Lake Yamamoto as soon as possible, before MacArthur’s air force makes detailed surveys of the area. The sudden appearance of a lake in the jungle would probably not go unnoticed.
The site of the lake is a natural rock bowl, covered by jungle, with the Yamamoto River running through the middle of it. Right next to the riverbank, men are already at work with rock drills, placing dynamite charges. “The inclined shaft will start here,” Goto Dengo tells Captain Noda, “and runs straight—” turning his back on the river he makes one hand into a blade and thrusts it into the jungle “—straight down to Golgotha.” The Place of the Skull.
“Gargotta?” Captain Noda says.
“It is a Tagalog word,” Goto Dengo says authoritatively. “It means ‘hidden glade.’ ”
“Hidden glade. I like it! Very good. Gargotta!” Captain Noda says. “Your work is proceeding very well, Lieutenant Goto.”
“I am only striving to live up to the high standard that was set by Lieutenant Ninomiya,” says Goto Dengo.
“He was an excellent worker,” Noda says evenly.
“Perhaps when I am finished here, I can follow him to—wherever he was sent.”
Noda grins. “Your work is only beginning. But I can say with confidence that when you are finished you will be reunited with your friend.”
SEATTLE
* * *
LAWRENCE PRITCHARD WATERHOUSE’S WIDOW AND five children agree that Dad did something in the war, and that’s about all. Each of them seems to have a different 1950s B-movie, or 1940s Movietone newsreel, in his or her head, portraying a rather different set of events. There is not even agreement on whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ. Grandma grew up on an Outback sheep farm. One might therefore think that, at some point in her life, she might have been an earthy cuss—the type of woman who would not only remember which service her late husband had been in but would be able to take down his rifle from the attic and field-strip it blindfolded. But she had evidently spent something like seventy-five percent of her waking hours in church (where she not only worshipped but went to school and transacted essentially all of her social life), or in transit thereto or therefrom, and her own parents quite explicitly did not want her to wind up living on a farm, ramming her arm up livestock vaginas and slapping raw steaks over the black eyes dished
out by some husband. Farming might have been an adequate sort of booby prize for one or at most two of their sons, sort of a fallback for any offspring who happened to suffer major head injuries or fall into chronic alcoholism. But the real purpose of the cCmndhd kids was to restore the past and lost glories of the family, who allegedly had been major wool brokers around the time of Shakespeare and well on their way to living in Kensington and spelling their name Smith before some combination of scrapie, long-term climatic change, nefandous conduct by jealous Outer Qwghlmians, and a worldwide shift in fashions away from funny-smelling thirty-pound sweaters with small arthropods living in them had driven them all into honest poverty and then not-so-honest poverty and led to their forcible transportation to Australia.
The point here being that Grandma was incarnated, indoctrinated, and groomed by her Ma to wear stockings and lipstick and gloves in a big city somewhere. The experiment had succeeded to the point where Mary cCmndhd could, at any point in her post-adolescent life, have prepared and served high tea to the Queen of England on ten minutes’ notice, flawlessly, without having to even glance in a mirror, straighten up her dwelling, polish any silver, or bone up on any etiquette. It had been a standing joke among her male offspring that Mom could walk unescorted into any biker bar in the world and simply by her bearing and appearance cause all ongoing fistfights to be instantly suspended, all grubby elbows to be removed from the bar, postures to straighten, salty language to be choked off. The bikers would climb over one another’s backs to take her coat, pull her chair back, address her as ma’am, etc. Though it had never been performed, this biker bar scene was like a whole sort of virtual or notional comedy sketch that was a famous moment in entertainment for the Waterhouse family, like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Belushi doing his samurai bit on Saturday Night Live. It was up there on their mental videocassette shelves right next to their imaginary newsreels and B-movies of what the Patriarch had done in the war.