Spiral

“Maruta?”

“The prisoners were maruta. Logs.”

“Logs? I don’t understand.”

“The official story is that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. We were cutting logs. We could have as many logs as we wished. We simply filled out a requisition form.”

Liam tried to contain his loathing for the man in front of him. The bureaucracy of genocide. It was not unlike the German death camps, the experiments of Mengele. People became chunks of flesh to be manipulated, tortured, disposed of like rats.

Kitano continued. “After we infected them, we had them breathe on a glass slide. Then the doctors cultivated the spores on the slides. It took many tries, but finally it worked. A variant that was both highly infectious and could be spread by the breath. We called this maruta the Mother. The Mother of the Uzumaki.”

“How many tries did it take?”

“Perhaps three, four hundred.”

“You killed hundreds of people in the tests?”

“For the Uzumaki, we killed eight hundred and seventeen before we had the breather. But there were many programs like this. We downed approximately ten thousand maruta overall.”

“Ten thousand? How could you stand it? It’s inhuman. Monstrous.”

“Perhaps. But the subjects at Unit 731 were well treated, well fed. Not like the other POW camps. Typically we injected them with the pathogen, systematically varying the dose. Then we watched as the disease progressed through them. It was very effective. Different strains could be crossed endlessly, the most deadly variants carefully selected by injecting them into prisoners and culturing the blood of those who died the fastest. After they began to show symptoms, we would take constant readings. Temperature, blood pressure, reaction times. Some we would dissect.”

“After they were dead.”

“No. While they were alive.”

Liam was aghast. “Why in God’s name would you do that?”

“To yield the most accurate picture. Anesthetic causes biochemical changes, affects the blood, the organs. As does death.”

“It’s murder. Sadistic, inhuman murder.”

“Research, Mr. Connor. Very important research.”

Kitano spoke as if he was describing the dissection of a frog. Liam took a deep breath, tried to keep his focus. “Who were the subjects?”

“Some were spies. Others criminals. The rest were Chinese civilians we took from the streets of the surrounding cities. The soldiers would unload the maruta and go back out again.”

“And then you would kill them.”

Kitano smiled condescendingly. “This was our task, Lieutenant Connor. Developing new weapons. Testing them. The scientists at Unit 731 were no different from your physicists developing the atomic bomb. Seigo Mori was no different than the American pilot that flew the mission that destroyed Nagasaki.” Kitano leaned forward, cuffed hands on the table before him. “He was a gentle man, Mr. Connor. Everyone liked him. His father was a factory worker who died when he was only three. He often told me stories about his mother and older sister, how they both doted over him, the only man in the house. He wished to be a poet. But he was willing to die.”

Liam asked the question he’d been waiting to ask. “You must have a way to stop the Uzumaki. To protect Japan.”

“No.”

“But if it found its way back to Japan, it would kill millions of your own people. How could you risk that?”

“We had no choice. The Uzumaki was the last resort. To be used when everything else was lost. When Japan had nothing left to lose. The Uzumaki is-how do you say it?-a doomsday weapon. Once released, it cannot be stopped.”

A PAIR OF SAILORS ON DECK ON THE NORTH DAKOTA POINTED UP.

Liam followed the path of their gaze but saw nothing but clear blue sky. He was talking to Scilla about what he’d learned from Kitano. Scilla, in turn, was telling Liam about the latest developments on the Vanguard, and the news wasn’t good. The captain was keeping everyone belowdecks to minimize the risk of the spread of the Uzumaki, but a group of sailors, almost certainly infected, had stolen guns and were holed up topside on the foredeck. They’d already killed three other sailors who’d tried to stop them. Liam was incensed that they were out in the open. Sooner or later, a spore would catch an air current, drift across the water, and infect one of the other ships.

Liam continued to study the patch of sky that the sailors were pointing to. It took a good minute before he saw it.

At first it was hardly more than a black speck moving slowly across the wide expanse.

“No,” Liam said. “No. No. No.”

Scilla grabbed a pair of binoculars. “It’s a damned goose,” he said.

They were hundreds of miles from any landfall. They could go days without seeing a bird. But the bastard was headed straight for them. “Go,” Liam said. “Get out of here.”

Liam looked across the open water to the USS Vanguard. On the foredeck, the siege continued against the sailors who’d broken free and come out into the open. A group from amidships launched an assault, the sailors firing back, screaming expletives. They were completely mad.

Scilla was dead still, watching the goose through the binoculars. “Keep going,” he said.

Liam could make out the goose’s features now, the broad wingspan, the slow beating of the wings. Closer and closer it came, still high overhead but dropping slowly. Liam tried to will it away. “Keep going,” he murmured. “Keep flying.”

The goose didn’t listen. It did the worst thing possible. It turned toward the Vanguard, then descended in spirals of decreasing radius, a narrowing gyre. Both men watched it drop, stall, and finally settle gently onto the deck of the USS Vanguard.

“Damn it!” Scilla said.

Liam watched through binoculars as one of the men on the Vanguard leveled a gun at the bird.

“No, no, no,” Liam yelled, as if he could be heard across the expanse of ocean separating the two ships. “Get a tarp. Try to cover it.”

The soldier shot, missed.

The goose flew away.

A FAST CRUISER AND A DESTROYER WERE DISPATCHED TO chase the goose, staying in continuous radio contact. They were barely able to match the bird’s speed running wide open, thirty-five knots. The destroyer even fired its four-inch guns at the bird, a ridiculously futile effort, like trying to shoot a fly with a rifle. It would have been laughable if the stakes hadn’t been so high. By the time they got the Vought OS2U Kingfisher scout planes in the air, the goose had disappeared into a cloud bank, and it hadn’t been seen since.

A quiet descended over the ship. The chase boats plied the waters, searching for the errant goose, the Kingfishers buzzing overhead. Calls had been put out, scrambling planes from Tokyo to join in the search.

Willoughby was nearby, his face red, talking to a major. “Imagine if the Russians have this,” he said. “The Russians were the first into Harbin. What if one of these cylinders ends up in Stalin’s hands? You think Uncle Joe wouldn’t use it?”

They were caught. If they did nothing, sooner or later the Uzumaki would spread beyond the confines of the Vanguard, either by a bird or spores carried by the wind. If they blew the ship up, they killed hundreds of men and ran the risk of spreading the Uzumaki even more widely. It was a devil’s deal.

Liam stared across the half-mile that separated them from the Vanguard. The screams of the infected sailors carried over the water.

If the Uzumaki was a doomsday weapon, a single goose could be the beginning of a catastrophe on a historic scale. The world had just survived the most brutal, destructive war in history. Could the worst be yet to come?