Final impact

“You can consider yourself a lucky motherfucker,” Jones said. “We caught you, but you’re going back to Pearl and we’re turning you over to Admiral Spruance’s folks. They’ll deal with you their own way.”

Hidaka’s head wobbled, and he thought he might lose consciousness. “Why?” he asked. “You do not take prisoners. Not prisoners like me, anyway. You just kill them.”

“Oh, don’t tempt me,” Kolhammer said. “You’re right, we would normally sanction you under protocol five of the standing rules of engagement. And believe me, by the time that was done with, you’d wish we had just put a gun to your head. But other people have a claim on your sorry carcass. And we’re giving you to them.”

“No,” he said, his voice breaking. “This is not fair. I cannot become a prisoner. Not after the shame I have already brought upon myself.”

Hot tears welled up in his eyes. He blinked them away impatiently. Kolhammer and Jones seemed surprised. But what would they know of bushido? After all the dishonor he had brought upon his name, to be cheated now of death’s release-it was unbearable.

Even with his hands cuffed he launched himself at Kolhammer, but he had covered only half the distance across the cave to him when a freight train slammed into him and drove him backward. He struck the wall painfully and looked up, expecting to see the admiral advancing on him like a common brawler. Instead, to his horror, a woman stood in front of him, the third American who had come through the blackout curtain. He had ignored her, thinking her some minor functionary. She bent down over him and released the uncomfortable plastic restraints.

He moved to push her aside and she broke his arm, snapping it at the elbow.

Then she went to work on him.

D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 0902 HOURS.

CINCPAC, PEARL HARBOR.

“What do you mean you’ve got him? How?”

Admiral Ray Spruance stared at Kolhammer as though he’d grown an extra head.

“Lonesome’s mountain troop was on a training run through the Ko‘olaus. Just stretching their legs after the voyage. They picked up his trail. Figured they’d stumbled across another holdout. Tracked him. Bagged him.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” said Kolhammer. “Luck of the Irish.”

“Master Chief Vincente Rogas is Irish?”

“Could be Black Irish…I suppose.”

Spruance frowned, not appreciating the joke, as he shuffled the photographs of Hidaka on his desk at fleet HQ in Pearl. “And these injuries?”

“He fell down,” Jones said, from the chair next to Kolhammer.

Spruance leveled a cold eye at him.

“A lot,” Jones added with a poker face.

“Has he complained of being beaten?” Kolhammer asked.

Spruance looked vaguely troubled. “No. No, he says he fell down a lot, too.”

Kolhammer dared not look at Jones. Spruance eyed them like a principal with two of his most difficult students, who also happened to be his main hope for the pennant. It was midmorning, the day after Jones’s mountain troop had stumbled across Hidaka-that much at least was true. They were meeting in a prefab hut that substituted for Spruance’s office while permanent facilities were being built-or rather, rebuilt. His office, like theirs, was a mix of old and new. A flat-panel display took up a big piece of real estate on the old wooden desk while paper maps of the Pacific theater were pinned to corkboard on all of the walls. His phone was a heavy old-fashioned lump of black Bakelite with a rotary dial, which sat next to a Siemens C65 flexipad. In the window behind him Kolhammer could see a flattop being nuzzled into its berth by a small flotilla of tugboats. It looked like the Intrepid.

“Well, I suppose congratulations are in order, then,” Spruance said finally. “This news will be very welcome back home. Hidaka is the first high-value war criminal we’ve managed to capture alive out here.”

“They don’t give up easily,” Jones said. “Same thing where we came from. Our bad boys used to just blow themselves up.”

“Is that why you take so few prisoners?” Spruance asked coldly.

“That’s not the simple question you think it is, Admiral,” said Kolhammer, who could tell that Spruance was quite steamed about something, presumably the injuries to Hidaka. “There’s a lot of history behind our policies. I can understand that you’d find them off-putting at first, but they’ve served us well in a war that’s run much longer than yours. And of course, we’ll be reviewing them after the end of hostilities here, when our forces are folded into yours.”

“I think you’ll be doing more than reviewing them, Admiral. I think you’ll be leaving them behind for good.”

“Perhaps,” Kolhammer conceded. “They were appropriate in context.”

“And they have their uses here,” Jones added in his rumbling growl. “Otherwise I doubt Congress would have approved the extension of our rules of engagement.”