VI

Japan Sinks

1

It was on the morning of April 30, at ten minutes after five, that the first cataclysm struck the Osaka-Kyoto area. Never before had an earthquake of this kind been recorded. Never before had a quake struck so vast an area.

Of a total population of 30 million in the four prefectures that made up the district, 3.5 million had already been evacuated by sea and by air during a thirty-day period preceding the quake. The new Osaka Airport had been overwhelmed by the encroaching water, and there was no choice but to fall back upon the old airport at Itami. By dint of frantic round-the-clock labor, the runways, damaged in the previous quake, were made ready to take the huge jet passenger planes just before daybreak on March 1. All the ground crew and other personnel from the now-defunct domestic airlines were put to work here, and soon planes were taking off and landing at the rate of some 500 in a twenty-four-hour period. With the aid of the United States Air Force, close to 500,000 people were flown out of Japan during this period, a figure unprecedented in the history of aviation.

During the period the sinking of the Pacific coast and the rise of the Japan Sea coast became much more pronounced, and the harbor facilities, especially at Kobe and Osaka, suffered immensely. Consequently, in most cases the loading of refugees had to be done with the transport ships anchored either offshore or in rivers, and every sort of small vessel that could be found was pressed into service to ferry the refugees out to the ships, from landing craft to old-style fishing boats. And despite all the obstacles, in this month some 3.2 million people were evacuated. The district evacuation headquarters, however, was determined to spare no effort to raise the rate to 5 million a month. The June rainy season would slow air transportation, and with August and September would come the ever present danger of typhoons.

The day the quake struck, at dawn on April 30, refugees whose turn had come had been massing at the airport and at the harbor all through the previous night. Those not so lucky, their mood desolate, were sleeping fitfully in their homes while light quakes succeeded one another without let-up. Their bags were packed and their personal goods gathered together, in anticipation of their turn coming or of an emergency evacuation.

Buses and trucks arrived at the airport, one after another, and silent refugees, loaded with baggage, streamed into the terminal. Tents had been pitched in front of the terminal, and flight numbers were posted on each. Police and airport personnel kept order in the long boarding lines. The adults were white-faced and silent. Since it was so early, infants were sleeping on their mothers’ backs, but little children frolicked about as though they were on an excursion.

And along the flooded coastline of Osaka Bay, at Kobe, Ashiya, Sakai, and other ports, and, along the banks of the Yodogawa and Anjigawa, similar scenes were being enacted. Osaka Bay was filled with ships of every nation, a vast number of them freighters or even ore boats hastily converted to take passengers. Ship after ship got under way with a dull, rumbling whistle, the water boiling up at its stern, and turned its bow toward Kii Strait and the open sea. The screeching, piercing whistles of the tugs that guided them echoed beneath a leaden sky.

At 5:10 A.M., a Sabena Boeing 707, making its approach from the southeast, landed on Runway B at Itami. The refugees waiting in the terminal fixed their eyes upon the jet as it taxied by them, the roar of its engines’ reverse thrust filling the air. At that moment those by the windows saw a white flash light the overcast sky.

Down by the harbors the people aboard ship saw the flash more clearly. Like a brilliant curtain of white, it rushed from east to west along the southern horizon, silhouetting the surrounding mountains as far off as Kii, Awaji Island, and Shikoku. Three times it raced from east to west and back again, touches of purple and green flickering here and there against the whiteness. A surge of dread went through the crowds.

The captain of the Okuma Maru, a 26,000-ton freighter loading passengers from one of the still-usable piers in Ashiya Harbor, had just come up onto the bridge, rubbing his sleepy eyes and yawning, when he heard a deckhand yell something. He turned to look at the southern sky, and the next instant he was jamming his finger against the emergency alarm button.

“Start engines!” he roared to the watch officer. “Prepare to cast off—emergency procedure.”

His mouth agape, the watch officer relayed the command to the engine room.

“The passengers—how many of them are still not on board?” yelled the captain, grabbing hold of the purser, who had come running up to the bridge at the sound of the ship’s siren.

“About two hundred. They’re coming on now.”

“Hurry it up. Put more men on it. The gangplank goes up in five minutes. We’ve got to get out of here as quick as we can. Get the radioman. Have him call the transport office and tell them we’re getting under way at once. Blow the whistle and let the other ships know. We’ve got to get out to the open sea.”

“What’s happening?” asked the startled purser.

“You damn fool! Chances are we’re going to get hit with a tidal wave.”

The boarding passengers had stopped in their tracks at the sound of the alarm, but crewmen with megaphones now rushed over the pier, hurrying them on board. It was then that the first shock struck. A terrified cry went up from the crowd standing on the half-drowned pier, and the violent up-and-down motion of the quake caused two or three people to lose their footing and fall into the water.

“Prepare to get under way,” said the captain to the watch officer. “We’ll go with the diesels. There’s no time for the turbines.”

The Okuma Maru’s whistle, like the sinister moan of some monstrous beast, echoed against the dark sky. The captain took hold of the portable speaker and called down to the pier: “Get those people out of the water. There’s still time. Another quake is coming. But take care in coming on. Don’t get excited.”

Then he turned to the deck crew: “Loosen the hawsers! Relay it to the stern. Prepare to cast off.”

On a runway at Osaka Airport the captain of a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet, loaded to capacity with 490 passengers, had just opened his four engines to full thrust and had started his quivering 350-ton plane on its takeoff run when the first shock struck.

Cups flew from a table in the control tower, and so violent was the up-and-down motion that some lights went out.

“An earthquake!” someone yelled. “Stop Flight 107. Don’t let it try to take off.”

It was evident even from the tower, however, that the plane had already reached a speed of well over 100 miles an hour. The air controllers watched through the rattling windows of the tower as the huge body of the plane began to shake with a rising and falling motion, its wheels bounding slightly. The chief controller’s face turned ashen as he gripped the microphone.

“Aren’t you going to stop him? What are you doing? Hurry!” shouted another controller in a frenzy. He tried to snatch the microphone away, but the chief controller pushed him roughly aside. The chief controller had been in the tower at Haneda Airport in Tokyo when a passenger plane landed at the very moment the great quake began. He knew how quakes behaved, and thus made his decision. The epicenter of this one had to be very close, and even if the runway was long enough for the Pan Am jet to come to a stop, the second shock wave would hit with disastrous effect before it was able to do so.

Flight 107 attained a speed of 115 miles per hour, then 140, its great mass bouncing up and down. Its wheels seem to leave the ground and then touch down again as it bounded along.

God help them!

Modern skeptic though he was, the chief controller’s heart cried out at that moment. He thought of the captain and copilot bent over the controls in the cabin, their eyes fixed on the end of the runway toward which their huge plane was hurtling at full throttle. As the distance remaining melted away, the captain would have to make his decision, and the point of no return was rushing to meet him.

Take off! the chief controller shouted within himself. In a brief moment his whole body had become wet with sweat. Don’t stop! Give it all you’ve got! Get into the air. Don’t get caught!

“He did it!” somebody yelled.

The chief controller brushed the sweat from his eyes as he watched the giant plane’s front wheels lift off, followed by its sixteen main wheels, with a bare fraction of the huge runway remaining.

“To all planes on the ground—this is the tower,” said the chief controller into the microphone. “Emergency! Cut your engines. An earthquake is coming.”

At that instant there was a sound like a thunderclap, and he was thrown from his chair.

“Take over for me,” he said in a hoarse voice to a colleague who came to his assistance. “Put the planes waiting to land in hold patterns. And get out of here. There’s a rough one coming.”

The first shock wave passed. No sooner had it done so, however, than up from the depths of the earth there came an uncanny groaning sound. The control tower, struck with a dreadful force, spun around as though upon a giant turntable. The assistant controller shouted desperately into the microphone to the planes circling above, but his voice was lost amid screams and crashes and the awful rumble of the earthquake.

At this same moment the American satellite Manned Orbiting Laboratory #3, having passed through the already bright Northern Pacific sky, was moving through the predawn darkness that still covered Japan at an altitude of seventy miles. The commander was monitoring the vast array of cameras and other instruments trained on the scene below. Two other crewmen were sleeping, and the fourth was peering out the observation window, watching through binoculars the smoke still pouring up from shattered Mount Fuji and the flickering points of fire that marked the newly active volcanoes strung through the central mountain ranges. With dawn just breaking, he found his vision obscured, and he switched on the night vision screen.

“Hey, look!” he shouted, grabbing the commander’s shoulder. “There’s something going on in Western Japan.”

The area covered by the screen was Ise Bay and the Kii Peninsula, south of Osaka. The commander turned to look over the man’s shoulder, and then he immediately switched to a wider coverage and started the video transmission.

“What’s the matter?” said a third man in a sleepy voice as he got out of his bunk.

“I don’t know. Get Pat up. We’ll need him. Look! The color of the water’s changing.”

On the almost black surface of the sea, just off the Japanese coast, blue-green splotches took form and then spread at incredible speed, moving east and west. And at the same time they began to move out into the Pacific, coalescing to form an advancing blue-green line behind which new splotches, light blue in color, began to appear. “Keep those cameras going. Jimmy, look out the other window.”

The fourth crewman, too, sprang into action. He threw switches on the control panel and fixed his eyes to the quivering needles, some of which began to spin erratically.

“Damn! This is really something,” he said, frantically making adjustments. “Both gravity and terrestrial magnetism are all screwed up. Bill, are we on the frequency of any ships in the area?”

“Yes. The LaFayette should be right below us. Should I tell them not to get too close to the coast?”

“My God!” cried the crewman with the binoculars. “Look what’s happening. Japan is breaking up!”

Before the horrified eyes of the four Americans, the outline of Shikoku and the southern part of the Kii Peninsula below suddenly seemed to blur slightly, as though trembling. The now blue surface of the sea became covered with small pale splotches, which spread out to the east and west, forming a single line. A shock sent a ripple over the surface of the ocean, and this, gathering up the splotches as it went, began to spread outward with awesome deliberation, a dark, sweeping curve.

“A tidal wave,” cried the crewman with the binoculars. The dark line of the wave spread across the blue surface of the ocean beneath them. It would strike the islands of Eastern Asia and even the coast of Chile.

“Hey, the southern coast of Japan is changing,” said the crewman at the movie camera.

“Pat! Get Houston,” shouted the commander, staring at the screen. “Tell them that Japan is going under.”

The southern portion of Shikoku and the Kii Peninsula along the structural fault line of the Yoshino and Kiino rivers had begun to move southeast into the Pacific, rocked by quake after quake. The rest of the Western Archipelago was moving too, but at a slower pace. The sea swept into the breach, and the Yoshino and the Kiino grew broader and broader. When the detached land mass reached the end of the continental shelf, it began to sink at the incredible rate of several yards an hour along a line some hundreds of miles long. Several hours after the first quake had struck, most of the towns along the southern coasts of Shikoku and the Kii Peninsula had disappeared, the ocean coming as far as the foot of Nachi Falls on the Kii.

The slippage between north and south along the central structural line gradually spread eastward. When the quake had struck Western Japan at dawn, the whole Central Region too, had experienced a medium-grade quake. Afterward the earth had continued to rumble in sinister fashion. Now at 10:47 a quake of like severity struck Central Japan, and a new fault developed on a line running from the mouth of Ise Bay to the Fuji River at the base of Mount Fuji. A tidal wave nearly thirty feet high swept into Sagami Bay, devastating the coastal cities. Destroying as they went, the ocean waters surged over the area depressed by the great eruption, moving along the line of the Fuji River as far as Fujinomiya.

A vast quantity of ocean water poured into the still-active Ashitaka volcano, southwest of the shattered slopes of Fuji. Mount Ashitaka shook throughout the day with minor eruptions, and then, at two in the afternoon, a thunderous explosion destroyed every vestige of it. The hostile elements clashed again, and firestorm and flood ravaged Central Honshu.

2

The television-equipped helicopter carrying Kataoka on a Plan D inspection mission crossed from the Kii Peninsula to Shikoku, following the fault line. The heavy rain brought on by the shock of the quake had slackened after an hour and a half, and Shiko-ku’s mountains had begun to show through the clouds. The helicopter pilot flew as low as he dared through the treacherous air currents, and as Kataoka looked down, he saw, through the breaks in the clouds, traces of the havoc below. He caught glimpses of ravaged earth and the dull, leaden glint of flooded fields. Furthermore, he could see any number of crevices cutting diagonally through the mountains from northwest to southeast. The green mountainsides were rent, exposing the raw texture of the earth beneath, red, brown, and black scars. In places the dark crevices seemed to gape open to incredible depths. It was as though giant hands had wrung the earth below like a mop. Kataoka could see landslides still taking place and steam boiling up from the crevices.

A colleague sitting beside him tapped his shoulder and pointed down. A passenger boat lay on its side in the rice paddies below. From such a height it was of course impossible to make out any people, but when Kataoka looked down at the red bottom of the stranded vessel, he thought of the crowds massed on the docks and shorelines that morning, fearful of what was ahead but relieved that their turn to leave had come, and a black depression took hold of him. His own family had been wiped out in an instant by the tidal wave that had followed the great Tokyo quake, and now he imagined he could hear the cries of his young brother and sister rising from the drowned fields below. He covered his ears with his hands.

“What’s the matter?”

“Take over for me, will you?” said Kataoka, getting up from the television monitor. “I have to vomit.”

At Plan D headquarters Yukinaga and Nakata were staring somberly at the television screen, watching the transmission from another helicopter, this one flying above stricken Osaka.

The three low-lying districts adjacent to the harbor were almost completely submerged. The water that covered them was an inky black, probably because the silt at the bottom of the bay had been churned up by the tidal wave. The dark water flowed through the city and, twisting and eddying as it went, surged farther inland. The factories and petroleum tanks clustered at the mouths of the rivers that flowed through Osaka had taken the brunt of the quake and the tidal waves. Some had been obliterated and others lay in ruins. And as Yukinaga and Nakata watched, those left standing were collapsing one after another into the murky water that flowed around them. A floating dock, the ship that had been under repair still within it, lay upon what seemed to be Benten Pier like a ship run aground. Only a portion of the roof of the huge pier facility was still above water. A capsized ocean liner was jammed into a shattered street, its red bottom pointing upward. The black oil which lay like a blanket over the bay and was flowing into the city as well had begun to flame up here and there. Even in the wards somewhat removed from the waterfront, the water had reached the third and fourth stories of buildings.

The elevated expressways lay twisted and shattered. The supports of the section running through the Nakanoshima district in the center of the city had been torn away, and it lay beneath the murky water. In this area only the tops of trees and buildings were to be seen and a flat-bottomed riverboat, its prow stuck fast in the side of a building.

The black water that had worked so stunning a transformation of Osaka was now lapping at the high ground in the eastern section of the central city, where Osaka Castle and the government buildings stood, twisting its way toward the northeastern suburbs along the banks of the Yodogawa. And to the south, the turgid, backed-up waters of the Yamatogawa merged with those that had swept over the dikes to the north, and began to move relentlessly toward Ikoma Heights, to the east of the city.

According to legend, when the Emperor Nintoku had founded his capital, the waters of the bay had covered most of what was to be modern Osaka. And now after earthquake and tidal wave, at the foot of Takatsu Shrine, where ships had moored in ancient times, what looked like a roofed oyster boat lay tilted, its prow aground on the shrine steps.

The roofs of the apartment buildings were crowded with refugees, who looked up with grim, anxious expressions, waving and shouting at the helicopter flying overhead. The murky water that swept around the buildings was filled with corpses, bobbing in the midst of debris of every sort. Such was the force of the current that in some places automobiles were swept together into a mass blocking a street, and here the black water turned white as it raced over these obstacles.

“It looks like well have to fall back on Senriyama for a marshaling point” muttered Nakata as he watched the screen. “Get in contact with D-3,” he said to the radio operator. “Find out what they think. The Expo 70 grounds are big enough for both the big helicopters and the STOL planes. And find out what damage they’ve suffered.”

The operator struggled to get through to the Ground Defense Force at Itami, where the D-3 group was located. When Itami finally came in, the reception was bad and it was difficult to get the message. It seemed that all road traffic had been blocked as a result of damage done by the quake, and the large ponds in the area had overflowed, causing extensive flooding. As a result the refugees, some of them nearly out of their minds with desperation, were besieging the Ground Defense headquarters. A helicopter sent from the naval station at Maizuru had been destroyed by the crowd, and a young officer had lost his head and fired.

“Fired? Into the crowd?” shouted Nakata, jumping up and lunging toward the radio operator.

“No. Into the air, I think,” answered the distraught operator, trying frantically to maintain contact. “What happened was that the crowd turned on the soldiers then. Two were badly hurt. . . . No . . . one man was killed.”

“What’s the matter with the military down there?” shouted Nakata, angrily pounding his fist on the table. “Tell the commander that the officers have got to set an example. They’ve got to keep their heads!”

“Don’t get excited,” said Yukinaga. “They know what they’re doing.”

All at once the various pinging sounds that filled the communication room were drowned out by the emergency buzzer. There had been a time when this sound would have galvanized everyone, but now they heard it with weary resignation.

On the fluorescent map on the wall, two, then three red lights flashed on in the North Central Region.

“From Matsumoto . . . Mount Norikura erupted. Yake and Fudo are on the verge,” a technician reported- “That was at seven thirty, and right after, a report from Nagano ... in the direction of Mount Takazuma . . . eruptions along the western slope ... at eight three.”

“Takazuma?” Yukinaga whispered, taken aback.

“That’s sooner than we thought,” said Nakata, clucking his tongue and glancing up at the board. “We thought it would start there sooner or later. . . . Well, at any rate, it’s on both sides of the Itoigawa fossa magna now. Lateral movement is more than two yards. Everybody along the coast there should have been moved out by now.”

“I hope so, but . . .” muttered Yukinaga in a hollow voice as he gazed vacantly at the flashing red lights on the board.

The buzzer rang again. Two red lights flashed on the extreme northeast.

“From Morioka . . . Iwate and Koma starting to erupt,” came the technician’s voice, echoing mechanically through the room.

Yukinaga stood in front of the board as though he did not hear. The glowing map of the Japan Archipelago seemed to blur before his unfocused eyes and take on the form of a dragon. The spine of the dragon, the central mountain ranges, was speckled with orange dots glowing like an ugly pox. The familiar outline of the Archipelago was being altered drastically by the encroaching blue spreading over its coasts. And crossing it and recrossing were countless vertical, horizontal, and slanted lines, each scarlet stroke representing a structural break. The most recent had flashed on the board that morning, the slash running from the Kii Peninsula across into Shikoku. Scattered from one end of the main island of Honshu to the other, the red dots, which stood for eruptions, glowed like clots of blood. Off the coast of the Kanto Region, though the Izu Islands had been all but overwhelmed by the sea, more red dots marked the volcanic fires still bursting up from the ocean floor.

The dragon was stricken.

A fatal illness was eating at him, destroying his very marrow. Racked with fever, his vast bulk covered with bleeding wounds, he thrashed about, vainly struggling against the fate that was tearing at him. The encroaching blue sliding over him was like the shadow of death.

Yukinaga was lost in reflections of his own. His vacant gaze was now fixed on the North Central Region, where clusters of red lights were flashing insistently.

3

When Mount Takazuma erupted that morning, Onodera was flying over the North Central Region in a small Defense Force helicopter on an inspection mission. Since the entire population of the region had supposedly been evacuated, he and the pilot were startled to see a group waving up at them from in front of a mountain shelter house. They landed, and Onodera got out of the helicopter to discover three parties of mountain climbers, fourteen people in all, students and young office workers. They had come into the region despite the evacuation orders and had been trapped by the cumulative disasters and bad weather. Two of them had already died from injuries and exposure. A girl was ill with pneumonia, and a young man was badly injured.

Onodera was enraged: “What the hell did you people have in mind when you did this? Did you have any idea at all of what was going on?”

“Yes, we did,” said a youth with high cheekbones in a weary voice. “Our parents and everybody else tried to talk us out of it. But we love mountain climbing. It’s what we live for. If these beautiful Japan Alps are going to disappear from the face of the earth, we wanted to bid a last farewell to them. What’s so bad about that? We came knowing that we might die here, and, if so, well and good.”

“I see,” said Onodera, turning around and starting back to the helicopter. “Well, if that’s the way you feel, it’ll make things a lot simpler for us.”

Onodera’s mood was a bleak one. What’s happened to me? he thought as he returned to the helicopter. The memory of Reiko came to him, a memory that had to be repressed violently lest it tear at him. The day that he had run blindly out of Plan D headquarters, volcanic ash had been falling on Tokyo and the trains had stopped running. He had had but a single thought: to get somehow from Tokyo to the Izu Peninsula, to the spot where Reiko had called from. He had run to the Defense Force helicopter base at nearby Ichigaya and demanded to be flown there. After an officer had refused him, Onodera had grown violent and had to be thrown off the base. Later, however, he had been able to get a ride on an armored troop-carrier. At Odawara, at the head of the Izu Peninsula, however, ash and falling rock had blocked the vehicle’s way. When Onodera had leaped down to the ground, his feet had sunk more than three feet into the gray wasteland. He had screamed out in frustration. After his return to Tokyo he had gone to Evacuation Headquarters and, disregarding the pleas of Nakata and Yukinaga, had demanded to be used in the most dangerous rescue missions. And so he had gone on these past weeks, sleeping and eating less than even his hard-driven companions, growing ever more haggard and desolate, and making a name for himself by the reckless heroism of his conduct. What am I doing to myself? he wondered groggily. I’m like a man already dead.

“Sergeant Tomita?” he shouted to the pilot above the roar of the rotor. “How many can we carry?”

“Two. Ordinarily it would be six, but there’s the equipment, and there’s no time to dismantle it.”

“Make it four. One of them’s sick. Two others are injured.”

“Can’t be done,” said the pilot, gesturing behind him. “No matter what you do, there’s not enough space for four.”

“I’ll stay here. So you can put one beside you and squeeze two more back there with the equipment somehow. You can do it, can’t you? And as for these other idiots, do you think you can get a helicopter to come from the squadron at Matsumoto?”

“No, I don’t think there’s any chance— But wait. A UH-1B is at Matsumoto Airport. It developed engine trouble the other day and had to stop for repairs. If it can fly, maybe I can have them send it. It would take all of you . . . but the problem of fuel . . .”

“Okay,” said Onodera, looking at his watch. “See what you can do, anyway. We don’t have much time.” Onodera turned away and walked back toward the youths, four or five of whom were standing a short distance away with worried looks on their faces. One of them, a young man with long hair and glasses, spoke to Onodera: “You weren’t really serious, sir, were you? Before, I mean. You wouldn’t just fly off and leave us, would you?”

“We can take three. Get the sick girl and the two injured on board. Hurry up.”

“There’s one more girl. She’s not in good shape. Can she go, too?” asked a strongly built youth.

“No. Only three. Even with me staying behind. So let’s get moving!”

Onodera went into the dimly lit cabin with the young men, and as the sick and injured climbers were being carried out, he noticed a young girl standing as though in a daze, with the side of her face pressed against the cabin wall.

“Better leave her alone, sir,” said one of the youths, frowning. “She was almost out of her head before. She’s suffering from shock.”

Disregarding this advice, Onodera walked up to the girl and put a hand on her thin shoulder and shook her. Her cheeks and clothes were stained with tears, and from the gaudily stylish cut and color of her mountain-climbing attire, it was obvious at a glance that she was not an outdoor girl. She was frowning and her body shook from time to time as though with sobs.

“Let me alone!” She shook off his hand, her voice like a scream, and shrank away from him. “I can’t walk any farther. . . . Mama! Please help me!”

Onodera took hold of the sobbing girl and gave her two light slaps across the face.

“Pull yourself together. Another helicopter will come to pick us up soon. Now help us load up these people.”

The girl stared up in shocked surprise, her eyes swollen from crying. Onodera thought that in the dim light of the cabin he saw a sudden awareness come over her face, but with no time for such considerations, he turned and ran out of the cabin.

“When you get them back, Sergeant, don’t tell anybody what really happened.”

“I understand. They’re refugees who were trapped by landslides. And as soon as I find out the situation on the helicopter, I’ll contact you.”

Onodera slapped the pilot on the shoulder, slammed the door shut, and turned to see a slight figure in bright-colored mountain-climbing garb walking unsteadily toward him.

“Mr. Onoda!”

Onodera was stunned. Then something stirred faintly in his memory.

“You’re Mr. Onoda, aren’t you, sir?”

“Onodera,” he said, staring at the girl.

“Why . . . imagine you here, sir!”

It was Mako. It was the little hostess he had met on the Ginza what now seemed long years ago. She threw herself into his arms and sobbed like a little girl as he stood buffeted by the wind and by the blast from the rotor.

“I’m frightened, Mr. Onoda! I’m tired. I can’t walk. I’m cold. Please let me get on the helicopter.”

“No,” he said, gently moving her away from the helicopter. “That’s for the sick and injured. Don’t worry. A big helicopter will come soon and take all of us.”

He gestured to the pilot, and the helicopter lifted off with a roar and a still stronger blast from its rotor.

“Does anybody know this girl?” he asked after the helicopter had gone.

“Nobody here, sir,” answered one of them. “I was with her group. Another one, my friend, went in the helicopter, and the fourth one died. He was her boyfriend, and my friend and I never met them before this.”

“All right,” said Onodera, taking hold of Mako’s arm and supporting her, “let’s get into the cabin.”

“What do we do now, sir?” one of the youths asked.

“We wait,” he answered, looking at his watch. It was 7:35.

“How long, do you think?”

“I don’t know. A big quake and tidal wave hit the Kansai Region this morning. Hundred of thousands of people were killed. We have perhaps a fifty-fifty chance that they’ll be able to send a second helicopter for us.”

“And if they don’t?”

They had reached the cabin door. Onodera stopped before going in and looked back at the windswept ridge. “Well, three have been saved anyway, and we will have had a chance to get to know each other.” Ignoring their varied reactions, Onodera helped Mako to lie down on a cot and then turned his attention to the wireless set he had taken from the helicopter.

“Let’s take a look at your map. If worse comes to worst, we’ll have to try making it out on foot.”

Just then the radio began to sputter. The voice was Sergeant Tomita’s, but it was hard to make out. Onodera pressed the receiver to his ear and spoke into the microphone as he balanced the set on his knees.

“This is Shirauma. It’s Onodera. Sergeant Tomita, do you hear me?” Onodera repeated the question again and again. Finally his expression brightened. “Cheer up, gentlemen,” he said after he had put down the microphone. “A helicopter’s leaving Matsumoto in about a half-hour.”

Though they had little strength left, the youths gave a hoarse cheer.

Onodera raised a warning hand. “It’s not coming direct but by way of Nagano. So we have a good hour and a half to wait yet.”

Before Onodera had finished speaking, however, the earth began to groan and the cabin began to creak as it rocked back and forth. A dull booming sound echoed through the mountains. Onodera bent quickly to pick up the radio, which he had put back down on the floor, but as he was lifting it up, a second shock hit the cabin, and he collided with one of young men, whose arm knocked the set from his hands. Before it struck the floor, however, a transmission came through marred by terrible static: “Attention ... emergency warning ... Norikura is on the verge of eruption.”

There were explosions that sounded like fireworks and then a cannonlike booming that seemed to reverberate through one’s whole body.

“An eruption!” shouted someone in a shrill voice.

“It’s started. We can’t get away.”

“Take it easy,” said Onodera. “Norikura’s way to the south.”

“No, it’s here. There’s another Norikura, and it’s right above us.”

Onodera glanced at his watch. It was 7:45. Outside there was a rumble as though the very axis of the earth had been shaken. One youth ran outside.

“It’s water,” he cried as the thunderous rumble grew louder. “Water’s coming down the slope.”

“It’s from Shirauma Lake,” said a tall young man quietly, his face white.

“We’ll get swept away!” somebody shouted. “We’d better run.”

“Wait,” commanded Onodera. He shouted to the boy outside: “Where is it going?”

“It’s all right,” the boy answered. “It’s turning toward Ume Pond.”

Onodera went to the door and looked out. The muddy water mixed with snow rushed down the slope close to the cabin with the force of a cascade, sending up a spray of snow and water. From time to time it would strike a rocky outcropping, and a plume of muddy water would spurt skyward. The mountains around echoed and re-echoed its deep rumble, and the valleys below, from which the mist was starting to rise, seemed to tremble. Part of the flow, arching like a waterfall, was falling into a crevice that had opened just below. Gradually its rumble subsided, but the sinister explosions and the roar that came from beyond the ridge line did not grow any less. Suddenly Onodera threw away his half-lit cigarette and sniffed the air. He could smell sulfur.

“Let’s go. We’ll go north of Akakura and down to Otani. It’s our only chance, and we should be able to make it.”

He rushed out of the cabin and drew an arrow in the snow with his foot. Beside this he wrote: “To Otani.” The wind would probably blow it away before the helicopter came, but with a wind like that no helicopter was likely to come anyway. He looked up to see Mako’s bright jacket in the midst of the windblown group that had come out of the cabin. He went over and took her by the arm.

“I can’t walk,” she said, sobbing. “I’m freezing ... let me die. The helicopter won’t come, will it?”

“Come on now. Pull yourself together and walk. If you fall down, I’ll pick you up.”

Fighting the wind-driven snow, they made their way across an open meadow and then began their descent of the east slope by means of a ravine. The sulfur smell grew more intense.

Heavy mist was rising from the Itoigawa Ravine in front of them, hiding the Togakushi Range on the other side. A chill suddenly ran through Onodera.

“Sir, look at that!” came a shrill voice behind him. “There’s fire behind the mist over there.”

Red flames tinged the dirty gray mist that was covering the sky, and as the ever present rumble of the earth grew louder yet, a second layer of flame appeared below the first, and a curtain of inky black smoke began to blot out the little brightness left to the sky. What was falling around them was no longer small rocks falling down the sides of the ravine but a steady rain of still-warm volcanic fragments.

Onodera stopped in his tracks and stood gazing at the red hell seething behind the mist. The sulfur smell had been in front of them, not behind them. It had been coming from Mount Togakushi.

“Sir, what are we going to do?” a youth beside him screamed as the hot ash poured down on them.

On April 30 at 8:03 A.M. Mount Takazuma in the Togakushi Range erupted with an explosion that blew off its crest. And an instant later there began that series of eruptions that tore open twelve distinct craters along the western slopes of the Togakushi Range.