Departing Ships
Our investigation at the port confirmed it once again: the military cargo ship coming from the Philippines would arrive tomorrow morning. The schedule was laid out plainly before us, yet the reason we kept checking it over and over was the grim reality that the Philippine waters — along with the South China Sea and all of Southeast Asia — remained an active war zone.
"If the Americans swing the Atlantic fleet back around to the Pacific, there'll be an uproar all over again," I said, watching the Deputy Minister of Military Affairs as we finished our check at the harbor. Hui-yeong nodded in agreement.
"Their Panama Canal offensive last year ended in failure, after all. No matter how decisively they win the carrier battles, they can't gain the upper hand against aircraft launched from their own homeland."
She was right. In 1944, just before the Sino-Japanese War wound down, the Imperial Japanese Navy, determined to completely seal off the Atlantic Fleet's passage to the Pacific, had committed its carrier squadrons to a massive bombing campaign against the Panama Canal.
A second Pearl Harbor — that was the Combined Fleet's intent. But the Americans weren't nearly that foolish. Having already anticipated an attack on Panama, they broke up the Japanese bomber formations using hundreds — perhaps more — of the fighter planes they'd been mothballing on the mainland, no carriers needed. Panama escaped with only minor damage.
"Realistically speaking, though, the US can't afford to pull its fleet out of the Atlantic right now. The Pacific is urgent, sure, but everyone who matters already knows the Japanese aren't in any position to land on America's East Coast."
"Is Britain doing that badly?"
"Dönitz has Churchill by the throat. They say if the blockade of England drags on just a little longer, the cabinet could collapse. Under those circumstances, bragging about landing in Italy isn't going to win the public over."
I hadn't been keeping up with international news beyond scraps of the Eastern Front, but Britain's situation sounded far from rosy. I asked her how it had come to that.
"Hmm… but ultimately, I'd guess it's because they overreached, pushing their fleet forward to India and Australia to fill the gap the US Navy left in the Pacific, and Japan smashed them for it. Hunting submarines takes more destroyers — and plenty of people are skeptical that Britain still has the capacity to churn out proper ones."
"Who knows how this war will end…"
Under those circumstances, the waters between the Philippines and the Korean Peninsula were, from our perspective, relatively safe. Joseon was not officially a member of the Axis, but from the Allies' point of view, it could easily be read as a de facto Axis collaborator.
China was no different, having signed a peace treaty with Japan. Word was that China had secured a guarantee of Japanese withdrawal from the mainland in exchange for renewing their trade agreement. In other words, even after stepping back from the World War, both China and Korea were still funneling resources to Japan —
which gave the Allies every plausible reason to target the transport ships running back and forth between them. That was exactly why I had to confirm, once and for all, whether the ship carrying Hong Sa-ik would arrive in Busan without incident.
The Japanese army had swept through the East Indies at a blistering pace, but the prospect of stretching the front all the way across the vast expanse of Australia — leaving themselves vulnerable to a counterattack — had won out, and they had ultimately abandoned the invasion. Besides, the Americans already had long-range heavy bomber wings and two divisions stationed in Australia waiting for them; a landing there would have met resistance every bit as fierce as the assault on Hawaii. The Japanese army had already bled heavily to take the fortified islands of Hawaii.
A country that had retreated even from China because it couldn't extend its front any further would have found it a heavy burden to push troops into a landmass as enormous as Australia — even if not quite as heavy as China. And while Australia had no navy worth mentioning, America's long-range bombers still spoke with the full voice of American rage.
You could feel the iron resolve of the American people: the only way to pay back that humiliation was to strike Japan itself. Every so often, US Air Force planes launched from Australia would drop staggering tonnages of bombs on Tokyo and fly back to Australia — or fail to. It was a nearly pointless exercise in military terms, but if they didn't do even that much, the fury would never be spent.
The war in this world was a bigger bastard than the one I'd known.
"In any case, the ship looks like it'll come in without trouble. Shall we head to the hotel? Just as you said, we should put in a call to Masan first. If anything goes wrong while we're working, that's the only place we can turn for help."
"Let's go, then. Ah — that ship is carrying Japanese patrolmen."
Among the countless vessels coming and going in Busan Harbor was one packed with Japanese patrolmen in their black uniforms. Hui-yeong nodded with a sour look on her face.
"Yes, it is. If they trickled out like this, steadily, Busan might see the day of its full return sooner rather than later. The sooner they hand it back, the better."
But among the men boarding that ship, I spotted a familiar face. Patrolman Honda, a splint strapped to his leg, was hobbling aboard on crutches, weaving among the others. When he noticed me staring at him in bewilderment, he turned his head and waved.
"Officer Ajisai!"
"Hm? Honda? What happened to you? You were fine when I saw you earlier."
He wasn't someone I particularly wanted to deal with, but seeing him suddenly quite badly hurt had my curiosity getting the better of me. The patrolman answered.
"Someone shoved me at the pier earlier and I fell off the edge. It felt deliberate, but I couldn't see who did it… It's nothing serious, though, so please don't worry. Ah — were you worried about me, by any chance?"
"No, it's just — when someone turns up out of nowhere wrapped in bandages, it startles you a little."
I turned slowly to glance at Hui-yeong. She shrugged. Honda called out again.
"In any case! If you ever come back to Japan, please contact me! I'll be waiting, so—"
"Ah, yes. Get home quickly before you hurt yourself worse."
I cut the conversation off there and turned toward the hotel. The moment I looked at Hui-yeong, she shrugged again.
"He struck me as a man with a poor reputation. Even back in the Jongno days, he apparently looked down on and demeaned Koreans, and sometimes beat them."
"Yes, well, that's true."
"It sounds like he made some enemies, too."
"I doubt anyone's carrying a grudge that deep, but yes, I imagine quite a few people hate him."
"Then it wouldn't be strange at all if someone shoved him on purpose and hurt him. It doesn't seem like anything worth calling a real incident."
The idea that someone who'd come to hate Patrolman Honda back in Kyeongseong had chased him all the way to Busan, shoved him off a pier, and gone home satisfied — unlikely as that sounded, I didn't raise any objection to her theory. Instead, I said this:
"Whoever it was, stopping at a broken leg makes them a rather merciful soul."
"You don't pull out the ox-slaughtering knife to kill a chicken, and baring your teeth to gnaw meat off a chicken's rib bone just means there's nothing worth eating. A harmless fool doesn't need removing. You don't think much of that man's character either, do you, Unnie?"
Going by what I'd seen of him as a workplace colleague — no, I didn't.
"But I think the problem is less his character than something else."
"What problem?"
"Maybe he's just a man who isn't very bright, who happened to be raised on the wrong lessons. It's a bad world."
"Hmm, I suppose that's possible."
Truthfully, I had no desire to condemn her, nor any appetite for a deeper debate on the matter. If my hunch was right — and I suspected it was — there was no question that Hui-yeong had done something far from moral.
But I had no wish to shove half-baked morality in the face of a woman whose story I didn't know — what she'd been doing during those two years in Japan, what she'd been reduced to that left her destitute on the streets of Kyeongseong, what hardships she'd endured traveling all the way to Wuhan just to reach Kim Hong-il.
She was a woman whose talent had been recognized early enough to make her Deputy Minister of Military Affairs at her age. She may well have already killed a person or two, and even if she had, nothing about it would have surprised me. This was an era where taking lives happened far more often than saving or protecting them.
Shoving a man off a pier and breaking something — that much might count as almost charming restraint. I didn't care to press the question further.
"Just out of curiosity — how many rooms does the hotel have?"
"One."
"I knew it. And the bed?"
"One big one. Plenty of room for two."
I let out a long sigh.
"Couldn't we change the reservation, even now?"
"We could, but…"
"But?"
"They'll charge a fee in the end, and that's not something I can put on the public account. A simple rebooking because of your change of heart, Unnie, means the difference comes out of your own pocket."
I let out another deep sigh. After buying the dress, I had no savings left at all.