1945

Grew answered, "Because we should never think of Hirohito as god in the same Judeo-Christian way we were brought up to use the word. At best Hirohito is a demigod, or godlike. He became godlike when he became emperor and not before. When he dies, the new emperor, now a mere mortal, will become godlike. Which brings up a point. Hirohito must avoid being assassinated. If the military doesn't like the god-emperor they have, they are perfectly capable of killing him and putting a new one on the throne. Japanese god-emperors grow old, sick, and subsequently die- or can even be overthrown and murdered- and that's much the way it is with Hirohito.

"This is a paradox: only the emperor can order the Japanese to surrender. No one else will be obeyed by the fanatics in the Japanese military. We can defeat them and conquer them, but without the word of their emperor, many will not surrender. They have their own intelligence sources and must be aware that we are reducing the size of our military, which they will take as a sign of weakness and be encouraged by it. It will not alter the fact that they are defeated and know it full well, but they will not, can not, surrender. Again, only Hirohito can release them from the code of Bushido."

Truman stood and looked out the window. "And the fanatics have Hirohito."

CHAPTER 15

As he vomited bile onto the ground, former POW Dennis Chambers was happy that at least the diarrhea had let up. He had thought he was doing so well. His diet, one he would once have considered repulsive, had actually been helping him gain strength. The bugs, worms, and occasional mouse, coupled with leaves and grasses, were filling and apparently nutritious.

He thought he knew what had disagreed with him so violently and vowed never again to eat the leaves ofthat particular broad-leafed plant.

"Jesus," he moaned, and lay back on the earth and belched hugely. Right now he didn't care if fucking Hirohito himself came by and took him prisoner. After a while he noticed that he had stopped vomiting. Of course, he had nothing in his stomach to puke, but that hadn't kept him from trying before.

After a few more minutes, he even began to feel a little hungry, but he didn't think his stomach could handle a nice, juicy worm. And he had been doing so well, he thought again.

But doing better had come with a price. With hunger pangs satisfied, he was no longer able to avoid thinking of life back home in California. When he slept, he saw his wife's face. In his dreams Barb was always smiling at him with that half-wicked, half-insolent look that he loved, and her golden hair was loose and hanging down on her tanned shoulders and to her firm breasts. Then, when he awoke, he felt empty and alone.

Then he heard the voices. At first he thought he was delirious and imagining things. But then he realized that the voices were in Japanese, that they came from the other side of the ridge, and that the voices were all males. This was bad. He had checked out the area before and found it empty, but obviously something had changed and it couldn't be for the better.

He stayed where he was until night fell. Then he moved carefully up the few yards from where he lay to where the hill crested. Crawling on his hands and knees, he slithered over the top and found a place where he could look down the slope to the valley below. A handful of men were hard at work heaping leaves and branches on sections of canvas that covered a pair of Japanese fighters. He blinked in disbelief. The planes were Zeros or, more precisely, Mitsubishi A6M2 carrier fighters. Once they'd been the finest plane in the air, but they'd been eclipsed by the newer American planes, and Dennis had shot down two of them himself. But what were they doing here? Of course, he answered himself, without carriers to launch from, the Japanese had to stash them on land.

The Japanese were dispersing their aircraft in small groups to avoid the overwhelming superiority America had in the air. During his strength-building and worm-eating days in the hills, he had seen a number of U.S. planes flying overhead. B-29 bombers, like schools of silver fish, flew high up in the sky, and hordes of fighters searched and stalked their prey from much lower altitudes.

Once, he had stood on the top of a hill and watched a P-51 Mustang streak through the air below him. Below him! He was lost in a strange land and standing above an American plane! He had screamed at the sight of the Mustang so near, yet so far away. The fighter had swept the valley again and had flown so close that he could see the pilot's face as he insolently surveyed his domain and looked for targets. The P-51 pilot gave no thought to the ragged-looking man on the hill, if he saw Dennis in the first place.