May 1947
Ogasawara Islands
THE SHIP’S HULL LOOKED LIKE IT HAD BEEN RENT asunder by massive claws. It was amazing that the vessel—a U.S. Liberty-class cargo ship—was still afloat at all, as it listed at a sharp diagonal angle.
Not far from the large hunk of scrap metal, two small minesweeping boats, Shinsei Maru and Kaishin Maru, were moored. Koichi and his crewmates looked on at the wreckage in awe and horror.
“What the hell could have done this…?” said Captain Akitsu, mouth agape. “Some sort of giant shark…? A whale?”
“No shark or whale could do that kind of damage, I assure you,” said Noda.
“Some new Soviet secret weapon, maybe?” Mizushima wondered aloud.
“Does that look like weapon damage to you?” said Noda.
“Well, what do you think it is?” said the captain.
“This could only have been done by a living organism. One the size of a small mountain, no less…”
“So you don’t have any idea either, got it. Gee, thanks for the diagnosis, Doc.”
As Koichi looked at the floating wreckage, however, only one word came to mind.
“Godzilla…” he whispered.
All of his crewmates turned to look at him, puzzled by this unfamiliar word.
“Look there!” Koichi shouted, pointing his finger to the surface of the water, where a number of deep-sea fish were floating—dead, their insides expelled from their mouths. “I saw the same thing on a small island during the war, when I…had to make an emergency landing. They said it was an omen, and sure enough, that same night, a giant monster—nearly twenty meters tall—attacked the island. And if we assume it’s only continued growing since then that creature could have absolutely committed this level of damage.”
“Really, now… And you saw this thing?” asked the captain.
“Yes. It was like a dinosaur straight out of prehistoric times, only far more imposing. ‘Godzilla’ is what the local islanders called it.”
“Godzilla…?” Noda repeated in earnest.
Seeing the serious expression on his learned companion’s face, Captain Akitsu hurriedly spoke up. “Pshaw,” he said. “No way something like that could actually exist. You were probably just half asleep and mistook an enemy tank or something for—”
“Yes, I didn’t expect you to believe me,” interrupted Koichi. “But the fact of the matter is that the entire Odo Island garrison was wiped out by a beast called Godzilla.”
“Wait… Did you say Odo Island? I thought the Americans did that…”
The purported U.S. assault on Odo Island, which should have been exempt from the Allies’ leapfrogging strategy, had become, it seemed, something of an infamous unexplained mystery among war veterans who were in the know.
“No,” said Koichi, shaking his head. “You should know as well as I do that there was no reason for the U.S. to put that island in their sights. By the time I was there, it was little more than an emergency landing site for malfunctioning suicide fighters.”
“Hang on…” said Mizushima with a gasp of realization. “Does that mean you were a kamikaze pilot, Shiki-san?”
Though he hadn’t intended to reveal this originally, Koichi took ownership of his own slip of the tongue with a firm nod of affirmation. “Believe me, or don’t believe me—it’s up to you,” he said. “But if this damage was done by the same creature I saw back then…then it must have grown ten times more powerful and ferocious since the time I encountered it.”
Sensing the fear in Koichi’s voice, the other men began to tremble as well. An eerie silence fell over the deck of Shinsei Maru. Whatever this Godzilla was, it was a force to be reckoned with—and not to be taken lightly.
“Wait a minute,” said Mizushima. “Why was it we were called out here, exactly? Don’t tell me they expect us to fight that thing in a ship like this?”
“I’m afraid that’s exactly what they expect,” said Noda, his expression resigned.
“But that’s impossible!” said Mizushima, a panicky edge in his voice. “I mean, if an American warship can’t take this thing down, then what the hell are we supposed to do to it in a dinky little tugboat like this?”
“Buy them a bit more time, they hope.”
“For what?”
“Takao is on its way here from Singapore as we speak.”
This ship name caused a sudden shift in Mizushima’s expression.
“Wait, you mean the heavy cruiser?” he asked. “The flagship of its class?”
“Yes,” said Noda. “It was supposed to be scuttled last year, but the Americans thought it might still be useful for situations such as this, so they’ve repaired it and now are sending it home. Even its original crew members were deployed to Singapore to retrieve it.”
This revelation was enough to make Mizushima’s fear of whatever sort of beast Godzilla was to melt away in an instant; now he was almost jumping for joy.
“Oh, hell yeah!” he shouted. “That’s awesome news! I mean, Takao’s a beast!”
“Well, assuming we can stall for time long enough for it to show up, yes,” said Noda.
“And why’s it gotta be our job, huh?” the captain muttered. “Why can’t the Americans just take care of it? It’s their ship, ain’t it?”
“They don’t want to do anything that might raise Soviet alarms, presumably. Not when tensions are already so high between them. They’d rather we just handle any minor conflicts ourselves. Which I assume is why they’re returning Takao to us, arms and all.”
“You call this ‘minor’? And hell, we’ve only got a 13mm machine gun to defend ourselves with until it gets here.”
“I believe the idea was for us to use recovered sea mines, actually.”
In a word, yes. The U.S. expected Shinsei Maru, outfitted with nothing more than a 13mm machine gun and a few salvaged sea mines, to fend off a beast that took out a massive armored cargo ship in one claw swipe.
“Oh, now I get why they called us out here!” Captain Akitsu said with a laugh. “And to top it all off, we have to fish out our main source of firepower from the drink too! Just lovely!”
“We’re also under strict orders not to speak of this to any outside party under any circumstances, I might add,” said Noda.
“Ah, yes! Their favorite move—just cover it up with a gag order! This country never changes, I tell ya… Maybe it doesn’t even know how to anymore.”
Shinsei Maru spent the rest of the night out there on the open ocean, gathering sea mines as they could, until eventually morning crept up over the horizon.
There was still no sign of Godzilla. Koichi had been taken off of watch duty to instead do a bit of modification work on the mines they’d recovered thus far.
Traditionally, moored naval mines were crowned by four Hertz horns—leaden protuberances enclosing glass tubes filled with sulfuric acid that, when shattered via contact with the hull of a ship, would allow an electric current to flow from the battery to the fuze, thereby triggering the explosion of its payload.
Koichi’s task was to remove those contact horns and solder on hardwired electrical line in their stead, which was connected to a remotely controlled detonator switch that would allow the crew to detonate the mines at will. These remote-controlled mines would be Shinsei Maru’s primary line of defense against Godzilla.
The Hertz horns were extremely delicate, however, and there were four to each mine; if even one of them were to break for any unexpected reason, the mine would explode, no doubt killing the entire crew—so this was nerve-racking work indeed.
Noda emerged from the ship’s interior with two freshly brewed mugs of coffee (which he’d been so excited to finally procure recently, after wartime shortages), and walked over to offer one of them to Koichi, who broke away from his work and took a moment to appreciate the warm, bitter scent as it wafted up into his nostrils.
“You know, it’s funny,” he said. “When I smell coffee, I feel like our society’s finally making real, tangible strides toward recovery.”
“Have you not slept yet, Shiki-san?” said Noda. “Here, let me take over.”
“No need—I just finished up. Now we’ve got two mines locked and loaded, all wired up and ready for action.”
“Good work. Sorry to ask that of you; I know it’s a stressful task.”
“Don’t worry about it. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”
“Not even a wink?”
“It’s hard when I think about facing Godzilla again…”
“I know what you mean. When I think back on the war, I have trouble sleeping too sometimes.”
“It’s a weird feeling, you know? Like, I want to avenge my comrades, but at the same time…I can’t deny that I’m scared to death of that thing.” Just then, Koichi’s expression dropped, and he quickly got up and leaned over the edge of the boat to peer down into the water.
“What’s wrong?” asked Noda, also rising.
Koichi pointed down at the surface of the water near the side of the boat, just below where they’d both been sitting moments ago.
“It’s happening again…”
Then, as if they’d been waiting for these words as their cue, scores of deep-sea fish began to surface from the depths, one after another, all of them dead with their insides out, burst open by the sudden change in pressure. A few even had their eyeballs popped out. It was just like what Koichi had seen back at Odo Island and near the wrecked cargo ship the day before—but there were far more of them this time, and their numbers were still growing greater by the second.