"Absurd," said Leahy. "The idea of a whole nation committing suicide is not rational. Nor is sending people out to certain death."

"Why not?" Grew admonished him gently. "We revere Nathan Hale and others who give their lives to save others when they had the chance to do otherwise. And"- Grew turned directly to Marshall and King- "haven't you or your field commanders ever sent someone out to do something that would likely result in their death?"

"But that's the exception," said Marshall, "while what you're describing is the rule. When we order men to fight a battle, we know that people will die, but we're elated when they don't. We don't have a national policy that requires suicide."

"Yes," said Grew. "And that is part of the cost of Japan's developing in such an isolated manner. As I said, their sense of values is, in many ways, so alien to us. I'm certain," he added wryly, "they feel the same about us."

"If their emperor is a god and god wants peace," Truman asked, "why are we still fighting? Why don't they obey their god and stop?"

Grew answered, "Because we should never think of Hirohito as god in the same Judeo-Christian way we were brought up to use the word. At best Hirohito is a demigod, or godlike. He became godlike when he became emperor and not before. When he dies, the new emperor, now a mere mortal, will become godlike. Which brings up a point. Hirohito must avoid being assassinated. If the military doesn't like the god-emperor they have, they are perfectly capable of killing him and putting a new one on the throne. Japanese god-emperors grow old, sick, and subsequently die- or can even be overthrown and murdered- and that's much the way it is with Hirohito.

"This is a paradox: only the emperor can order the Japanese to surrender. No one else will be obeyed by the fanatics in the Japanese military. We can defeat them and conquer them, but without the word of their emperor, many will not surrender. They have their own intelligence sources and must be aware that we are reducing the size of our military, which they will take as a sign of weakness and be encouraged by it. It will not alter the fact that they are defeated and know it full well, but they will not, can not, surrender. Again, only Hirohito can release them from the code of Bushido."

Truman stood and looked out the window. "And the fanatics have Hirohito."

As he vomited bile onto the ground, former POW Dennis Chambers was happy that at least the diarrhea had let up. He had thought he was doing so well. His diet, one he would once have considered repulsive, had actually been helping him gain strength. The bugs, worms, and occasional mouse, coupled with leaves and grasses, were filling and apparently nutritious.

He thought he knew what had disagreed with him so violently and vowed never again to eat the leaves ofthat particular broad-leafed plant.

"Jesus," he moaned, and lay back on the earth and belched hugely. Right now he didn't care if fucking Hirohito himself came by and took him prisoner. After a while he noticed that he had stopped vomiting. Of course, he had nothing in his stomach to puke, but that hadn't kept him from trying before.

After a few more minutes, he even began to feel a little hungry, but he didn't think his stomach could handle a nice, juicy worm. And he had been doing so well, he thought again.

But doing better had come with a price. With hunger pangs satisfied, he was no longer able to avoid thinking of life back home in California. When he slept, he saw his wife's face. In his dreams Barb was always smiling at him with that half-wicked, half-insolent look that he loved, and her golden hair was loose and hanging down on her tanned shoulders and to her firm breasts. Then, when he awoke, he felt empty and alone.

Then he heard the voices. At first he thought he was delirious and imagining things. But then he realized that the voices were in Japanese, that they came from the other side of the ridge, and that the voices were all males. This was bad. He had checked out the area before and found it empty, but obviously something had changed and it couldn't be for the better.

He stayed where he was until night fell. Then he moved carefully up the few yards from where he lay to where the hill crested. Crawling on his hands and knees, he slithered over the top and found a place where he could look down the slope to the valley below. A handful of men were hard at work heaping leaves and branches on sections of canvas that covered a pair of Japanese fighters. He blinked in disbelief. The planes were Zeros or, more precisely, Mitsubishi A6M2 carrier fighters. Once they'd been the finest plane in the air, but they'd been eclipsed by the newer American planes, and Dennis had shot down two of them himself. But what were they doing here? Of course, he answered himself, without carriers to launch from, the Japanese had to stash them on land.

The Japanese were dispersing their aircraft in small groups to avoid the overwhelming superiority America had in the air. During his strength-building and worm-eating days in the hills, he had seen a number of U.S. planes flying overhead. B-29 bombers, like schools of silver fish, flew high up in the sky, and hordes of fighters searched and stalked their prey from much lower altitudes.

Once, he had stood on the top of a hill and watched a P-51 Mustang streak through the air below him. Below him! He was lost in a strange land and standing above an American plane! He had screamed at the sight of the Mustang so near, yet so far away. The fighter had swept the valley again and had flown so close that he could see the pilot's face as he insolently surveyed his domain and looked for targets. The P-51 pilot gave no thought to the ragged-looking man on the hill, if he saw Dennis in the first place.

Dennis jerked his thoughts back to the present. What was he to do about the Jap planes and the men who were so close to him? He counted four people at the little camp. That made sense. Two pilots and two mechanics. There were no other guards- after all, they were safe in Japan, weren't they?- but all four probably had weapons. All Dennis had was a piece of metal he had sharpened against a rock and used as either a knife or a shovel, depending on the need of the moment.

It was, he decided sadly, time to move from this place to a safer one. Then he saw something that changed his mind. One of the mechanics opened the flap of a tent and, stacked neatly in the back, were several bags of rice. Even better, they were filled with wild rice, which was much more nutritious than the white version. If he could somehow get his hands on that rice, then he would be able to really improve his health and his chances of surviving. But was it worth the risk? He closed his eyes and wondered what Barb would have him do. The answer came quickly. Her last words to him had been "Come back to me."

On a densely wooded hillside in Kyushu near Nagasaki, Joe Nomura struggled with the radio supplied him by the OSS. It wasn't that the thing was bulky. It was surprisingly small and compact. The problem was operating it with only one hand with a beginner Boy Scout's skills with Morse code. There simply hadn't been time to make Joe Nomura an expert, and he struggled with what he had to say. This too was difficult. Never a great scholar, he now had to be the soul of brevity and conciseness, which were language skills he'd never considered important.

Of the two, brevity was the most in his best interest. It had been hammered into him that the Japs had listening devices and would, sooner or later, likely pick up his transmissions. Then they would try to locate him using triangulating devices that he only barely understood. He could only hope that they would discover him later, much later. Like 1950.