The Grasshopper's Run

  Putting the front sight on a sod hut and on a person are two different things.

  Elmore Leonard, Valdez is Coming

  These impulses had been uncommon lucky, but I couldn’t go on like that for ever. Ek sal ’n plan maak, says the old Boer when he gets into trouble, and it was up to me now to make a plan.

  John Buchan, Greenmantle

  Contents

  Prologue

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  The village should not have been where it was, when it was, but these matters cannot be changed in a moment. So it was there, then, on that day. And all the events that happened afterwards happened.

  It was not so much a village as an exclamation mark of little thatch huts, goat and pigpens running down the angular face of the hill. It was shut in on three sides by the nearer hills, which came down to the little stony stream at the base of the ravine.

  The hill on which the village itself stood was surrounded by thick oak and alder in a wide radius, and was far away from any trail going west into the Naga Hills. It was the easternmost settlement of the tribe, just west of the Dikhow river. It was also considered by everyone who knew it as remote, protected and as safe as possible in times such as these.

  The Colonel of the Imperial Japanese Army who crouched beneath an alder looking down over the crest of the hill at the village thought so too. Inaccessible. Cut off. The place could not be found even if someone took great care to look for it. In fact, he thought to himself, after he won this campaign, after Japan won the war and he became a celebrated veteran and lectured to officers at the new Senior Course Academy in Kanagawa, he would talk about camouflaging an operations base and how the British did it.

  Which goes to show that he was not only an ambitious soldier and a tactical mind, but also a man who counted his poultry farm before the eggs arrived.

  He was also harried. For nearly a week he had been playing hide-and-seek in these green hills and ravines, with his crack unit, parallel with elements of his division further south and west. He was tracking the British 50th Parachute Brigade’s elements, one of the few hurdles to the invasion. That brigade was scattered somewhere around here. He did not have to seek them out; it was a job for—he thought —lesser men. He was more useful to his superiors as a planner than a fighter, but for this once, if he could find that irritating brigade, why not?

  Various signs showed the village was not empty like the few they had passed on their march west. Tracks in the hills, freshly-cut wood. For the Japanese officer, these were means to cover up the British presence in this harmless-looking collection of huts. The livestock could be another deception.

  His deputy now told him the men were in position. Three crews manning Type-3 heavy machine guns covered the village from different angles, their firing arcs converging at the approximate centre. The 250 men under his direct command would follow their Rikugun Taisa unquestioningly, as they had through the plains and mountains of China and the ravines of northern Burma to this.

  He was certain the new arrangement would give him a chance to shine in the eyes of his superiors. The generals might disapprove of his methods sometimes, but here at the gates of India he would show them what he was.

  There would be no warning, none of that translating garbage he had to pass on to his troops earlier. This was certainly the British brigade or a part of it, as he had radioed to his division. He ordered the attack.

  For a moment, his mind considered the possibility that he could be wrong, and he should wait for confirmation. Just as quickly, he told himself it did not matter at all. If he was right, good. If he was wrong, it was only a waste of ammunition.

  In fact, on that afternoon beneath that mildly sunny sky on that hill, the Colonel and his intelligence were both wrong. The British 50th Parachute Brigade under Brigadier Hope-Thompson was at that moment 120 miles to the south, near Imphal, and they too were tracking the enemy. Two days later, the British were to meet Major General Shigesaburo Miyazaki’s 58th Regiment at a place called Sangshak, which they would hold over six days of close fighting, taking murderous losses until the defenders ran short of water, were outnumbered and withdrew.

  But that was in the future, so now the Colonel watched as his troops drew their rifles, the machine gunners jacked their levers and the firing began. The lead heavy machine gunner, firing into the huts, drew a line roughly north-south, bisecting the village and those who ran out of the huts now. Unsurprisingly, these were older men, women and children, and as they came out they were cut down in the first salvo, screaming and flailing as the steady liquid clack-clack of the heavy Nambu machine guns gave a finality to the matter.

  The Colonel saw the first few go down, waited to see if troops came out behind them. But there were only more of these local hill people, little better than the Ainu back home, those half-animals up on Ezo Island. How they and these lived, if at all they were human, was beyond his understanding. Anyway, he could not let them get away to tell the British. He ordered the men to keep firing. The men, always in awe and fear of their Colonel and the stories they had heard of him, obeyed, though not without hesitation, for these had been normal men when they had begun a little more than a year earlier.

  It took ten minutes. The machine guns drove through the walls of the huts, drawing the people out, and the riflemen aimed and shot, aimed and shot. The last of the stragglers went down and the troops were ordered to sweep the village.

  The soldiers walked softly downhill into the village while others set up a perimeter in case the enemy was sighted, some going down to the creek to check for the wounded. The others entered the huts, firing at the wounded or those who still moved, not acts of mercy but to finish the job. Far away a hornbill called, and the screams of the dying answered.

  It is a miracle of sorts that he had survived the barrage, but maybe not a miracle, because the riflemen were firing at the running villagers and the machine guns were firing at the huts, but at waist-height. Whatever the reason, or maybe because he had kept his head, the boy had hidden in some corner somewhere.

  Superior Private Kawabe stepped through the door of the wood-and-thatch hut and died, the foot-long throwing spear or nu impaling his throat to the mud wall. The second soldier brought his Type-38 rifle up and went down with another spear in the centre of his chest.

  The Naga crossbow is not a weapon of war, because traditionally Naga engagements (sadly more often against opposing Naga tribes than invaders) have been close-range ambushes with knife, spear and machete. But the boy leaped out through the window behind the hut, landed on his feet effortlessly and shot the first rifleman running around the corner, the ten-inch iron-tipped and rooster-feathered arrow, meant for running boar at thirty feet, sticking through his heart and out behind his back.

  The next Japanese did not have time to point his rifle as the boy, trying to take the quickest way out, was on him, his wood-handled knife stabbing, stabbing horizontally through his ribs, stabbing as they tumbled in each other’s grips, stabbing and tearing at his clothes, stabbing until the others clubbed him on the head again and again.

  When he came to, he was tied to a cattle stake, bloody and bruised. His head
was bleeding where they had nearly broken it in, his ribs hurt where they had kicked him afterwards in rage. A group of Japanese was talking, explaining to what he thought was some kind of leader.

  The boy was beyond being afraid now, even if he did not look around at what had happened to his people. Some part of his dazed mind told him what would happen to him, but the other parts were beyond caring. So these were the Japani.

  From somewhere where such thoughts seem to stay, he remembered his mother now, when he was a little boy before he went to the morung. ‘Uti, little Uti,’ she was saying to him. And his brother. Always, little Uti and his friend together, and they knew she would tell them a story.

  ‘Uti, shall I tell you about the Molomi?’

  And that was the story they heard so many times, his brother and he. Each time she made it sound different, something new to hear in the same ancient story of the End of the World, the Fire from the East and the Water from the West. And always, always, the Grasshopper.

  He smiled a little now, looking at the Japani’s dead eyes and remembering his mother’s as she told them of the Grasshopper. And how the boys would talk about it later and how they would argue about if it was a true story, his brother scoffing at his belief.

  Now at the cattle stake near the pigpen, Uti understood because he had always believed. So this was the Fire from the East. He understood and he remembered how the story ended.

  You can burn me now, Fire, he thought, though he could not imagine what dying would be like. You can kill me.

  The tall man, with the long knife at his belt, looked at him now and again, nodding at his men, reassuring. Such things happened, he seemed to be telling them.

  The Colonel was, in truth, secretly amused. Plan for a brigade, he thought, and what you get is a half-animal with a knife.

  ‘Ask him where the British … no, of course you don’t know what he speaks, do you?’

  His adjutant shook his head.

  ‘Hmm. All right. Finish him, but make sure he knows first what it means to kill the men of the Retsu Heidan.’

  And that was that.

  You can burn me now, Fire, thought the boy. You can burn everything you want.

  The Grasshopper will come looking for you.

  It took another half an hour. The screams, if any, were swallowed whole by the hills and the forest and the light breeze which came now.

  The group of armed runners, racing in from the west with a message from an old man to leave the village quickly, arrived three hours too late.

  It was the evening of 18 March 1944.

  Chapter 1

  The hall khalasi knocked on the door a full hour before time, discreetly but just loud enough. The boy came off the bed as he always did, almost fully awake. Some part of his mind told him instinctively it was too early for his wake-up call, and the blackwood Siemens on the wall confirmed this.

  In most ways, the boy was a creature of routine, a routine he had created to make sure he did not become like, say, ‘Hendy’ Henderson, the other sleeper, whom nothing short of a Jap bomb could wake up before eight.

  Gojen Rajkhowa, however, was a runner. He was many things, including the A team keeper, but of all things in this school, he was a runner. Each day he woke at dawn and ran five to seven miles, alternating with quarter-mile sprints every weekend, long easy strides across country, smelling the dawn and hearing the dawn sounds, pacing himself.

  He was glad to study in Bengal, as close to home as possible then, but the earth did not feel the same. It had the smell of too many people living and cultivating the same patch over too many centuries, too much history of famine and misery, not like home, not like the feel of the fertile fields and the nearness of the forests and the hills and the rains.

  He was on the big side for his age, had rather oversized hands; his bones were long and he was slim, even lanky, not too big or deeply insulated but tough in the way boys recognise quickly and learn to avoid. If you asked them why, they would not have given a plausible answer. It was an instinct, that was all.

  His face, on a short but thick neck, was plain and unremarkable, even ordinary. People passed him by without a second glance. Which he liked. His cheekbones, seen in a certain light, were high, the mark of his Thai ancestors, but his eyes were not nearly as Mongoloid as other Ahoms’.

  He was popular in his way, as a good keeper, and had a few friends, English, Scottish Protestants and a few Irishmen and Indians, had learnt their humour and handled his soup spoons and butter knives with the knowledge of fifteen years of careful breeding. They liked him for his ease and comfort among them, his friendliness, his family’s background. He belonged, they all thought.

  Sometimes he would walk the grounds or the fields outside and his eyes looked and saw everything, but differently: distances, heights, gradients, the position of the trees and their proximity to each other, the flight pattern of some bird.

  And, more important, remembered.

  He would often choose places from where the view was wide and far. He would sit and look at the distance, his body still, his hands and feet steady, not moving at all. His friends noticed his capacity for immobility, a complete inertness when he sat like this, but it was not stiffness either, nor was he uncomfortable. It was a type of ability.

  He was also disgustingly good at mathematics, but this was no surprise to the one man in the school who knew who he really was.

  ‘A man is here to see you, sir,’ said the khalasi, with the proper respect kept for residents of the school and the masters.

  Something in the way he said ‘man’ clicked in the boy’s head, for he had an ear for these differences. Whoever it was, and the boy seldom had visitors, was unexpected and different to the bearer’s experience.

  The man was sitting in the shade of a mango tree, one of several on the new grounds of the school, which had shifted here outside Calcutta two years ago, after the city was bombed by Japanese aircraft. Some would call this a needless precaution, shifting an entire school for a distant war, but the parents were such that when they made a suggestion, it was usually followed.

  The boy saw the man first and it touched him that he had shown the courtesy to wear a dhuti-panjabi as a gesture to the city he was in. It was as much an effort at blending in, at not drawing attention, although the man’s face, his swarthiness, his build and the honour-tattoos peeping out from the collar at the neck said something else.

  ‘Mopumeren, khura,’ said the boy, smiling. Among them he addressed each by name but for this man he also said ‘uncle’. ‘If we get you a Gandhi cap you will look ready to join the protesters. Only way I can get thrown out of this school now,’ he said, needling the older man. But he saw his particular type of humour was not much use.

  ‘What brings you here? When did you arrive?’

  ‘Shiluti is dead.’

  Like that. There was no hesitation, no outward sign of grief, no method or formula for breaking the news. Mopumeren knew this boy could take it, like he could.

  The boy sat down next to him and stared at nothing. Like that. Uti was dead. The words went around inside his head and he sat there for a long time and a short time.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Japani. Your grandfather heard they were moving into our hills in large numbers and he told the old man. We all knew the Japani were in Konyak land, but we never thought there were so many of them. The old man sent runners to all the villages there, but when they reached Uti’s ancestral village they found the whole village killed.’

  The whole village. Eighty people from Uti’s tribe, in their ancient village. Secure in their belief that, as in the past, no one would come across the ravine. Underestimating the speed with which this invader moved and went everywhere. Not understanding that this was a different war.

  ‘They tied him to a stake and cut him, I think with bayonets. I think they enjoyed it. They bled him a lot before he died.’

  Gojen said nothing.

  ‘The old man sent me to you by the fir
st ferry. He wants …’

  ‘I am going back with you.’

  ‘He said it depends on you. But he wants you to do something first.’

  The man brought out a small parcel wrapped in palm leaves to keep it dry. ‘The runners did not stay to bury the people but they brought Uti back and buried him at Mokokchung. Other people buried the villagers. But the runners found this behind a hut.’

  The boy took the piece of paper from its wrapping. It was a better kind of mill-made rice-paper, but coarse still, the print smudged in parts. It was covered in what the boy thought must be Japanese, although he could read the English sentences.

  ‘The old man wants to know who did this, boy. He wants to know who was there. He knows these matters as well as I do. The runners tracked about 200 men there. Someone was leading them. I know of such raids. They fire first from a distance and check for survivors later. Uti must have hidden somewhere when they started firing and killed some of them when they came to check. This must have fallen out of the clothes of one of them. The old man says you study with the sons of big Ingraz, eat with them. Find out what it says.’

  ‘Meren, you wait here.’

  The boy knew who to ask.

  *

  The Reverend George S. Bartlett, MA (Lit. and Theo.), headmaster, a respected man of letters and also a man with something of a past, had sat down for breakfast on his lawn when Gojen walked up to his fence-gate, tieless but in his hall shirt and khaki shorts and let himself in.

  Bartlett was in his mid-forties and had mild manners, although the junior classes were much in awe of him and more concerned that he was a good middle-weight who still sparred. Greying brown hair, hard brown eyes, the kind of eyes that seemed to have seen a whole lot more, and worse, than volumes of literature and theology. He was still in shape and would continue to be. He, too, was a creature of those habits which help when the time comes to cast them off.

  ‘Ah, Rajkhowa, I was expecting to see you run past shortly. You may sit down, but if you plan to run afterwards you will stay away from the toast and marmalade.’