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.