Hell's Gate(39)
The bound man turned back to face the black-clad officer. “This actor I’m thinking of—really strange excuse for a romantic lead. I’m thinking he’d be better off—”
There was a flash of movement and the prisoner dropped as if he had been deboned. Like the Indian dart that had taken him down four hours earlier, the lightning-fast punch that Sergeant Schr?dinger just landed to his temple went completely unseen by Captain R. J. MacCready.
Wolff stood over the crumpled man for a moment, then shot the sergeant a look that was half exasperation and half annoyance.
“An interesting way to end an interrogation,” came a voice from behind the colonel. The man was Dr. Kimura, one of the project’s latest additions.
“Can this one be responsible for the killings?” Kimura asked in passable German. He was wearing a lab coat, but beyond that his choice of attire fell apart quickly. The bespectacled scientist wore short pants, and on his feet—some sort of platform-elevated sandal. A paper surgical mask had been pulled down and now served to barely conceal several of his ample chins.
“I think not,” Wolff replied. “Clearly he was sent here to locate his missing friends.”
“Good, then I can use him for—”
“Before you do anything, Doctor, I will spend some time with our guest.” Then, without further explanation, and before Kimura could respond, the colonel turned and strode off in the direction of the Nostromo, Schr?dinger at his heels.
“You probably weren’t so haughty when you hung up our other submarine,” Kimura muttered to Colonel Wolff in Japanese, and under his breath.
Satisfied that the colonel and his goon were not around to observe, he prodded the prisoner’s body with a geta clog. Further satisfied that the prisoner was at best only semiconscious, he nodded to a pair of Japanese soldiers who were standing by at attention. The men gave no hint that a minute earlier they had been snickering at Kimura’s eccentric attire.
The doctor’s order consisted of a single word: Maruta. But it was all the pair needed to hear. They watched their superior hobble off, trying hard to mask his limp. They’d all spent their childhoods in the shadow of polio.
The two soldiers hauled the prisoner’s body up by the arms and began dragging him away—his boots digging a pair of shallow troughs that ended as the men approached a hangar-shaped building, roughly the size of a truck garage. The rounded roof of the corrugated structure was streaked with reddish brown rivulets—the metal panels corroding after nearly four months in the hothouse climate. One of the men kicked open the door and they disappeared inside Dr. Kimura’s “woodshed.”
Akira Kimura wished he were still in Manchuria, or anywhere else for that matter. Anywhere but here, where savages fly their colors on our prized submarines—and have the impudence to rename them. What is a Nostromo, anyway?
My work there was far from finished, the doctor thought, as he peered into a microscope. “Maruta,” he said to himself. It was a word that caused him to chuckle, in spite of the heat, humidity, bad food, and worse company. Back in Harbin, even Dr. Ishii had gotten a laugh out of that one. Maruta.
Kimura was a trained microbiologist, with a doctoral degree from Kyoto Imperial University. He’d stayed on after graduation, working at the army’s medical hospital and winning the favor of the senior officers there. The young researcher had identified himself with the National Socialists, adopting their goals and aspirations, as well as their hatred for all things capitalistic, bourgeois, or liberal.
Kimura’s life changed by accident in 1928, after he read a document from the Geneva Disarmament Convention. It was a report that banned chemical and biological warfare. But the young scientist was not dissuaded.
“If they took the trouble to outlaw it,” Kimura reasoned, “it must have great potential as a weapon.”
Using his connections with several ultranationalists in the War Ministry, Kimura began to lobby for the creation of a program to develop pathogenic weapons. Knowing that their military was greatly outnumbered by the Bolsheviks, Kimura’s superiors were all too eager to promote the development of weapons that could be used to counter the Soviet advantage in any upcoming conflict. Kimura savored the memory of how his stature rose during construction of a massive research complex in occupied Manchuria. By the time of its completion in 1939, and under the supervision of Lieutenant Colonel Ishii Shiro, the Ping Fan facility consisted of more than seventy structures. In addition to the state-of-the-art labs and dissection-autopsy facilities, there were twenty-two dormitories, a large Shinto temple, eight restaurant-bars, and brothels serviced by young Chinese and Korean “comfort girls.” Kimura always found it amusing that the fifteen thousand Ping Fan construction workers, illiterate Chinese mostly, died from the work-to-death directive, without ever knowing what they were building.
Even less fortunate were those housed in buildings 7 and 8, who were surprised at being given ample food and warm cells in which to sleep.
“My patients,” Dr. Kimura had called them, but he knew that the comforts lavished upon these men were akin to those lavished by Kobe cattlemen on their well-fattened herds. In hushed tones, the program was referred to as “Unit 731.”
Most of Unit 731’s “patients” were Chinese but there were Russians and Koreans as well. There were even a few dozen English and American prisoners of war. Although all would eventually meet horrible deaths, the method of their murder varied greatly. Some were staked to the ground in gridlike patterns, then “bombed” with a broad spectrum of disease agents, ranging from plague-infected fleas to anthrax. Kimura and his crew would then calculate the effective killing distance of the pathogens from the epicenter of the blast.