Designated Targets

“There were Chinese soldiers on your troopships.”

“Not soldiers,” said Homma. “Prisoners.”

“Why were there Chinese prisoners on your troopships?”

“They were targets,” said Homma.

“Decoys?” asked Stafford.

“Targets, for your rockets and death beams.”

Stafford translated the reply.

“Decoys,” Jones muttered to Brigadier Barnes. “They were never meant to set foot on land.”

The Australian just nodded.

Jones leaned over and whispered into Coulthard’s ear. “See if you can get him to tell you what the fuck he was doing here, anyway. I think this whole invasion was a fucking sideshow.”

Coulthard checked her watch. “I’ll need to boost the dose in ten minutes, sir. We should wait until then. He’s beginning to resist the drug.”

Homma was shaking his head, refusing to talk about the Chinese anymore. Stafford switched the angle of his attack, asking the general why the army had let itself be duped into quitting China.

Homma looked like he was attempting to bristle, but nothing came. Just a sigh. “Yamamoto,” he said quietly.

She knew she was going to be haunted by this place for months, if not years to come. Bundaberg was one of the worst atrocities she’d ever been witness to. The tiny hospital was overwhelmed. They’d begun to set up emergency facilities at a nearby high school, but had to find a new location when it became obvious that the Japanese had used the place as a torture and interrogation center.

One civilian health worker, a Rhodesian doctor named Michael Cooper, had survived his imprisonment and proved himself invaluable in triage. He told her of the appalling mistreatment meted out to the most vulnerable members of the community. Hundreds of survivors owed him their lives, but Major Margie Francois knew that wouldn’t be enough to save him from himself. He was going to spend the rest of his life mourning the ones he couldn’t save. She knew that particular level of hell only too well.

They were standing in the entrance of a giant hospital tent as dusk fell, discussing the likely treatment needs of the surviving locals when a passing corpsman stopped to tell them that the field punishments had already begun.

The major watched as a sickly grimace stole over the doctor’s face. His cheeks first drained of color before flushing bright red. His Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively as he struggled to say something.

Francois placed a hand on his arm, which was twitching with nervous tension, or possibly exhaustion.

Cooper croaked at her. “We were told that the uh . . . procedure . . . was open to the public.”

“Why don’t you go have a look, Doc,” she said softly. “It helps. Sort of. Helps me sometimes anyway. You’ve done more than enough here. Go on, if that’s what you want.”

She gripped his arm a little tighter. “But if I was you, I’d be getting some rest, too. You look like a man on the edge of collapse. You’ve earned a break.”

The Rhodesian shook his head. His eyes were a thousand miles away. “No, Major,” he said, “I’ve earned the right to see justice.”

“Okay, then, take this,” she said, handing him a stick of gum packed with a very mild stimulant. “It’ll get you through the next two hours, but then I’m going to send a corpsman to make sure you get some sleep. Two hours, Doctor. I mean it.”

He agreed to follow her instructions, and shambled out into the dark. Francois watched him go.

The snap of gunfire was already drifting over the ruins of the town, from the main enclosure of the liberated prison camp. About two hundred survivors had gathered there to watch the rather unceremonious retribution being exacted on their behalf. She didn’t need to see it herself again. She’d briefly attended a Sanction 4 execution earlier in the day.

No drumbeat accompanied the condemned men to their final moment. No holy men of any faith administered the last rites. The prisoners’ hands were cuffed behind their backs with plastic ties. They were led or dragged over to a deep trench that had been dug in the center of the playing field by a mechanical excavator. The simple charge of “a crime against humanity” was read out to them. They were forced to kneel at the mouth of the pit, and a single bullet was fired into the back of each prisoner’s head by a man or woman, officer or enlisted, who had been rostered onto field punishment detail for that day.

Jones and Barnes divided the task equally between their commands. As a medical officer, Francois was one of the few who had the right to claim exemption from the duty, and as long as she had worthy lives to save, she generally exercised her right.

But later, standing in triage, surrounded by a pile of bloody rags that had been cut from the body of an eight-year-old boy who was now in surgery, having a gangrenous leg amputated, she felt the black heat rising inside her head again. It made her wish she’d gone with Cooper.

What the hell is wrong with people that they’d do these things—to little kids?