Sukimoko

Sixth Installment

Publication date: December 8th, 2024
Copyright 2024

By Dean Adams Curtis

 

CHAPTER 28

Persephone's Room

“Stop struggling,” he whispered from behind her, his breath smelling of garlic, “I’m an American.” He was a spy catcher. “U.S. Army.”

He had her wrapped tightly in his arms with one of his hands over her mouth. He thought that she looked a bit like Katherine Hepburn.

“I’m going to take my hand from your mouth. Do not scream. Okay?”

She nodded her head. He uncovered her mouth. “What do you want?”

“I’m on a mission,” said the soldier, who was of Navajo heritage.

Persephone Bloom stopped struggling. The man’s grasp on her loosened. She spun from his hold and stared eye-to-eye at the intruder in her home northwest of Manila on the Island of Luzon in the Philippines. She had learned from her strong mother how to stand her ground, whether face-to-face with her brothers, or other Dayton, Ohio boys and men. The man before her, who looked like he was an American Indian, had already easily disarmed her of her small knife that she had grabbed and had readily enwrapped her, a state she had no wish to repeat being within. Still, she stood strong. “What does that have to do with me?”

On a moonless night two nights prior, U.S. Army spy catcher Kim Chee had parachuted with his small team to land in the mountains east of Manila. He had done so due to actionable intel on the location of a ruthless Japanese spy, a man who ran a web of agents that had woven themselves into the fabric of Philippine island society in preparation for invasion. Via brilliant and valiant work by U.S. Signals Corps and Filipino Scout spies several months before, soon after the Japanese had entered Manila uncontested due to MacArthur's evac order, Kim Chee had received a readout of a recording from a meeting between the spy and Mr. Bloom. He had sought out Penelope Bloom's husband because he knew about the drug trade. He wanted in on the profits, all the profits.

"On the bright side, Mr. Anthony Bloom, you will still have your profits from bringing elevators to Asia, yes?" the Japanese spy had taunted and gone on. "You have a warehouse full of assets. We now live in Japan's Greater East Asia Prosperty Zone. I am certain you will find many customers."

As a U.S. Army specialist school grad, Kim Chee was fluent in both Japanese and Korean. His cover story in country was as a conscripted Korean private, a courier in the Japanese Imperial Army. ecause it sounded Korean. he had his real name on the forged Japanese Army Korean conscript papers he carried. He had assessed his cover in multiple encounters with Japanese soldiers. It had proven effective. To drive his cover home he sometimes added a kimchee joke about his name as he pretended to eat kimchee, then wave at his breath. As final part of his cover pitch, so his breath matched the story, he had packed kimchee that he consumed bite by bite before encounters with Japanese.

“I’m trailing someone,” Kim told her. “He’s on his way.”

“Who?” she asked. “Why is he coming?

“A Japanese intelligence officer,” Kim answered. He knew this because the United States had broken the code used by the Japanese military. Kim was in an elite platoon of intelligence officers, signals intel, and codebreaker guys stationed on a Pacific atoll a very long plane trip away. Kim knew that the U.S. military could not do anything to save the Philippines from the Japanese occupation, not while the Japanese Navy controlled the Western Pacific. But guys like him could bite back a bit, perhaps rabidly, as he and his team hoped to do. “Your husband is more than just an Ohio elevator salesman bringing elevators to Asia. He's been dealing with the Chinese Filipinos, brokering shipments of opium to Ohio.”

From the darkness of her second floor bedroom they saw a black Ford sedan pull up outside her walled front garden gate. “There he is,” Kim stated. "Sit in your closet with your head down. Focus on calming your breath. I will take care of this. It'll be me who opens your closet door."

The U.S. army specialist spycatcher left her bedroom and hid at a stragegic position in the house he had previously found. In addition to his U.S. Army intel mission, he had received a last minute message from Washington D.C., from her Ohio Senator father, “Bring her home.”

CHAPTER 29

Prison Yard

“Bakit?” five-year-old Emiliano whispered to his eleven-year-old brother Francisco in the slight moonlight illuminating their room. The word sounded like bucket and meant ‘why?’

The brothers shared the room with their mother, Maria, who was soundly asleep on the other side of a sheet wall. The room was above Sukimoko, their sari-sari shop in Malabon, on the wet market street down the way and around the corner from the house of the American woman who looked like Katherine Hepburn.

Emil wondered if he should do as his brother had insisted. What his brother demanded was scary. He had asked Emiliano to accompany him to hoist a basket of food over a barbed wire fence erected around a Japanese prison yard. It was the place where the Japanese were putting Filipinos who had resisted their invasion. Emil and Francisco had watched the hasty construction of the prison yard near the beer brewery on a rise within a marshy river estuary at the confluence of Polo and Tullahan rivers.

“Because,” Francisco said. “The Japanese have Tito Renee inside and he sent a message through Tito Arnell.” His brother went on about how his uncle Arnell had gotten the word from someone, but Emil was not listening. He did not want to do it, no matter who got word to who. “Tito Renee is gutum (hungry),” his brother implored him.

“Magagalit si Nanay,” Emil whispered. ‘Mother will be angry.’

“Wag sabihin Nanay,” Francisco whispered back. ‘Don’t tell Mother.’

On the other side of the sheet wall, Maria stirred in her sleep and made a sound. Her son Francisco almost put his hand over her son Emiliano’s mouth, but her youngest grabbed his older brother’s arm. Francisco put up a finger of his other hand to his lips, then showed his palm to Emiliano who let go of his arm. Quietly, he uncovered a basket of food that he had carefully bound with rope.

The brothers slipped from Sukimoko. As they walked down their street, lit by a sliver-of-silver Moon, Francisco quietly explained to Emiliano what he called the details.

 “The yard is guarded by Korean conscripts,” Francisco explained to his brother. Emil did not know what a Korean or a conscript were. “I did it already last night with Tito Claro,” his brother assured. The boys encountered nobody, then boarded a little skiff style boat and pushed off across a marsh. Both of them worked the skiff pole together to move the water craft. But as they approached behind the prison yard they needed to keep the skiff in reeds to stay hidden because three guards were there drinking something and laughing. The boys did not know whether the men were speaking Korean or Japanese, as they had never heard either language spoken before. Finally, one man urinated. Then the three men left.

Francisco and Emiliano used the long skiff pole to hoist the basket over the fence, then the fence to pull it from the pole. When the basket hit the ground of the dark prison yard the boys saw a figure inside running to get it and then disappear. The boys had time to get the skiff back out into the reeds, but a bright searchlight beam began to sweep the area. One swing of the light hit the top of their skiff pole. A single gunshot was fired in their direction.

The boys heard the bullet whiz by them through the reeds.

Asleep in her room above Sukimoko, Maria had a nightmare about her boys and awoke suddenly. She got into her sandals and stepped to the sheet wall. She pushed a sheet aside. She saw her two boys sleeping soundly. Curiously, she smelled body odor. She knew that her boys had both bathed before going to bed. Perhaps, Maria reasoned, they’d also had some particularly bad dreams.

Chapter 30

Corregidor Dive

The next day Japanese pilot, Hideki Shingo, looked down at Corregidor Island.

Corregidor sat in the mouth of Manila Bay. It guarded the shipping route to and from Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. Hideki knew the city was already under Japanese control by the invasion force that had landed at Lingayen Gulf three weeks before. However, he knew, as did Japanese High Command, which had ordered waves of dive-bombers toward Corregidor, that the island was America’s last stronghold in Asia.

From their Formosa Island air base, Hideki‘s wing of dive-bombers had flown over five hundred miles in five hours, armed with the biggest bombs they could carry under their wings. He checked his fuel supply. He had a little over half a tank of gas left. He breathed in deeply through his nose and exhaled slowly through his mouth.  

He banked his plane. So too did the other pilots of planes in his attack formation. Their attack had begun. Hideki dropped the nose of his plane toward his primary target, big American cannons, a battery on the West side of the island, one of a dozen big cannon batteries that were firing huge shells at Japanese ships. The big American cannons had sunk a Japanese destroyer and damaged other ships that attempted to enter Manila Harbor or to get close to Corregidor.

As the needle of his elevation gauge fell below two hundred feet, anti-aircraft shells began exploding around the plane. He began a prayer to his ancestors. An explosion burst before him. He accepted that he would then join his ancestors. But his plane flew through the blast unscathed.

Moments later, his primary target was clearly in his bombsight’s targeting crosshairs, Hideki released the middle of his three bombs, the one mounted under the plane’s fuselage. Thereafter, he pulled his plane out of its dive and vectored toward his secondary target, another cannon battery. When he had it centered in his bombsight he released his remaining two bombs from under his plane’s wings.

Corregidor disappeared from below him. Over open water, he pulled up hard and his newly unweighted plane willingly accepted the challenge of a forty five degree climb skyward through more anti-aircraft shell explosions. Each explosion left a black puff of smoke, but none of the explosions damaged his plane.

When the needle of his elevation gauge read five hundred feet, Hideki leveled the nose of his plane on the horizon.

He looked to his left. The other planes of his bomber wing began to arrive at his altitude. Ichi, ni, san, yon, go. Everyone was alive but several were in planes that had sheet metal blown off by explosions of anti-aircraft shells and they were all in planes blackened by proximity to the explosions.

He gazed to his right. From his vantage point high in the sky he saw the magnificent Bataan Peninsula. Its two volcanos had obviously formed the landmass that embraced Manila Bay. Hideki followed the flight plan north along the west coast of the peninsula. It was a route heading he could have continued on back toward the Japanese airbase in Formosa from which he had flown, but instead he banked right. That day his orders and flight plan vectored him onto a heading inland toward a Philippine runway his countrymen had repaired. His flight of bombers would be the first Japanese planes to land at a former American airfield they called Clark.

Chapter 31

Bataan’s End

Rocky focused on remembering General MacArthur's words, a month before, precisely as he and 80,000 others on the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula and those out on the island at the entrance to Manila Bay had heard them that night when they had been broadcast over loudspeakers to the U.S. troops and Filipino Scouts.

"Men of Bataan and Corregidor, after declining to leave you twice before, I have received orders from my commander-in-chief to proceed to Australia and take command there." Rocky recalled that MacArthur had a tremble of sadness and sincerity in his voice. "Men, I must leave you now, but you have as my solemn oath that if God spares me I will be back to stay. Have faith, men! God bless you!"

Since then, knowing no help was coming, the allied force had relentlessly fought the Japanese on the ground holding a line across the Bataan Penninsula. Rocky knew that the Americans held the middle of line. He hadn't kept up on activity on the left flank along the Pacific, but he knew that and the 31st Filipino Infantry held their right flank along Manila Bay. Until they ran out of shells, U.S. artillery batteries hidden in volcano highground hideaways had weakened Japanese assualts against the allied men on the line. In the days after the U.S. artillery fell silent, Japanese artillery intensified, as did Japanese troop strength, and allied forces fell back, southward, behind a constricted line. Behind them, south across a waterway they watched Japanese dive-bombers target Corregidor Island.

With the American and Filipino fighters on the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula were five thousand civilians. On that day at the start of April 1942, Juanita and her friend were among them.

The good news was that her friend had found her brother. The bad was he was wounded. He was being cared for in a U.S. Army medical tent. He lay on a cot in critcal condition and unconscious. Juanita sat with her friend on either side of the unconscious brother. After some time, Juanita reached out and put a hand on her friend's arm. “Ako ay gutum.” She was hungry. Her friend nodded. Juanita left her.

Juanita entered a food tent. It was serving beans and rice, along with chunks of carabao meat. After she waited in a line a ladle of that combo landed on a tin plate Juanita held. She looked up to see she was eye-to-eye with Rocky, the rock-jawed, just-right-height American who had ladled it.

“You never told me your name,” Rocky stated.

“Juanita,” she replied.

“I am pleased to see you again, Juanita,” Rocky said.

“I am pleased to see you again, Rocky,” Juanita replied. He smiled broadly.

He watched her blush then remembered to keep serving. She found a place to sit and eat. She kept him in sight. His eyes kept alighting on her. After the food was gone, Rocky found a spot to sit near her.

When she asked him where he was from, he filled her with stories of his upbringing in the United States. Rocky was from Jefferson, Georgia and had gone to college in Athens, Georgia. He had been more interested in boxing, racing cars, and flying planes than college classes. Those interests had led him after a few steps to enlistment in the 27^th Aerial Bombardment Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps based in Savannah, Georgia.  Because he was in the Communications section of the 27^th, he had been the first to see the coded message ordering Operation Plum, the deployment of the 27^th to the Philippines on November 7^th, 1941. Rocky told her that it had taken his group most of November to cross the Pacific. He said they were still putting planes together and dealing with missing parts two weeks after arriving when the Japanese attacked. “Our Bombardment Group never got a chance to do any bombardment.”

That day’s sunset had seemed special to Juanita, seeing as she had spent it hearing Rocky’s stories. She marveled for a few moments that they had met at all and had met again. Exhausted, well-fed, and feeling secure, Juanita drifted off to sleep leaning against a tree. Rocky stayed near her as she slept and stayed awake digging a foxhole.

That night, to waxing moonlight, planes from a Japanese aircraft carrier in the South China Sea began dive-bombing the bottom of Bataan.

“Juanita!” she awoke hearing Rocky shout her name.

She saw the top half of him waving to her. “Get over here!” Rocky shouted. She turned to see a bomb explode, then another explode after even closer. Their proximity immediately propelled her toward Rocky who caught her and shielded her with his body in his foxhole as a series of additional explosions of bombs from the Japanese dive-bombers rocked them.

Sometime after, Rocky unshielded her and helped her to stand in the foxhole. Before them burned the black charred trunk of the tree Juanita had slept against earlier. The mess tent where she and Rocky had reconnected was gone. Around them they heard moans.

“See who we can help?” Juanita asked. Rocky nodded, made a footstep with his hands that she stepped on, and boosted her out of the foxhole. They soon located two individuals who were moaning. One was an American soldier who Rocky knew, and the other was an old Filipina. Juanita tied ripped cloth bandages around three limbs where the old woman was bleeding. She and Rocky both noted to the wounded individuals that the medical tent was just down the road and got them up and walking with their assistance toward that destination.

A gray predawn sky after moonset was above the med tent’s former location. On the ground were twisted and blackened remains of carts and cots and patients. Juanita looked for any sign of her friend or her friend’s brother among charred corpses,  “We keep going,” Rocky stated simply. She nodded. They kept going.

Rocky found some of his guys from the 27^th with radio gear in a ton-and-a-half truck. The wounded who had walked there with them were guided into a medical tent.

“The food is gone,” they explained to Rocky. “The area commander wants us to take our truck to the rear and load up on food for the front.”

Next, Juanita helped the 27^th guys unload the radio gear from the truck into what they called a temporary communications center. Then Rocky drove, with Juanita seated next to him, on a seat they shared with a Sargeant Baker, who Rocky called “Sargeant Super-duper Supply Scrounger,” headed to the rear to load up on food for the front.

South of the front line, they first crossed a sturdy steel bridge across the Lamao River, then Rocky, as skillfully as a race car driver, navigated the winding jungle road, carefully passing wounded and retreating men, until at midday they had made it to the supply depot at the most southern tip of the peninsula.

“Do you see these stripes?” Sargeant Scrounger asked the lounging depot guys. “Do you see these stripes? You want the front line to hold back the Japs? I want a dozen crates of everything you’ve got loaded onto this truck, immediately! Get up and get to work! Now!”

The depot guys did so.

Rocky smiled to Juanita. “Super-duper.”

An officer of the Filipino Scouts appeared before Rocky. “I heard you just came from the front. Do you know the whereabouts of President Quezon? Is he safe?”

“President Quezon stayed in Manila until he and General MacArthur were forced to flee to Corregidor Island,” Rocky reported. “Then General MacArthur was ordered to leave and continue prosecuting the war from Australia. He and President Quezon are there now.”

 “Thank God! If the Japanese had caught President Quezon we Filipinos would have lost our greatest patriot,” the man said forcefully. “He is the only one who will be able to return the Philippines to normal after they are driven out.” Then, the Filipino Scout officer was off.

Soon after, the supply depot guys finished loading the one-and-a-half ton truck with food. Rocky pulled the heavily burdened beast out of the depot and headed back north front line.

Overnight, during the chaos caused by the bombing runs, the front line had shifted southward. The first they heard of it was a man shouting that the Japanese had broken through the line and were right behind. Rocky ignored the warning, as it was the most common rumor they had heard recently, followed by the one that Allied help was about to arrive.

The number of people flowing south on the road had dramatically increased, with others who shouted versions of, “The Japanese are right behind us,” but still Rocky’s determined northward navigation, with little beep-beeps of the trucks horn repeated relentlessly, did not abate.

They drove onto the steel bridge over the Lamao River that they had crossed earlier.

Rocky braked the truck. The three of them stared across the empty bridge twenty yards away. There, blocking their exit from the other side, faced toward them, was a Japanese machine gun carrier. A machine gun mounted behind the cab stuck out from between armor plates. Japanese soldiers standing around the machine gun carrier were surprised to see the big American truck across the bridge. For a moment, nobody moved.

Then, bullets fired from the machine gun impacted on the bridge pavement far ahead of them. A hidden Japanese gunner adjusted his aim up toward their truck and bullet impacts approached. Sergeant Scrounger threw open the truck’s passenger door and was the first out of the cab and over the bridge’s railing. Heading out behind him, Rocky both grabbed and propelled Juanita with a shove across the truck's seat. He held her as they went over the railing.

Thus, the three did not see the large caliber machine gun bullets shatter the truck’s windshield and rip through the cab’s seatback, a wasted volley of bullets due to their absence.  They plunged twenty feet toward a shallow, swiftly flowing river with prominent boulders.

Chapter 32

Malabon Breeze

Open, swinging in a breeze at dawn, the metal gate of his Malabon abode first alerted the Ohio elevator entrepreneur, Anthony Bloom, that something was wrong. He and Penelope never left that gate open.

The first blood he saw was on their front porch.

“Penelope!” he called as he entered the door. At first he stood not comprehending, then realized he was seeing a dead human in black trenchcoat laying face down in blood that covered their finely tiled living room floor. He gasped, then spun back out onto his porch, repulsed by the scene and a fetid iron scent in the air that he had inhaled, and vomited.

Anthony rounded his house, headed toward a back door and caught his breath, startled to come face-to-face with a carabao in the side yard munching on a mouthful of their flowers. The beast stared at the human, satisfied to remain just where he was, doing as he was, as the man went by him.

 Anthony entered his back door and in the back kitchen he saw a second dead body. Like the other dead body in the living room, it was that of a Japanese man. This man was face up, so Anthony saw that in addition to a black trench coat the corpse was clad a gray suit. The dead man’s throat had been slit. A black hat was on the concrete kitchen floor beside the deceased human in his pooled blood.

“Penelope!” Upstairs, Anthony found a third body, the corpse of a similarly dressed Japanese man whose neck was twisted in a way that the Ohio man turned away from. “Penelope!”

He checked the rest of his house. Nowhere, to his confusion and also relief, did he find his wife.

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