Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

“Look at all this crap,” the old man muttered. “With all this, you would think…”

With all this, you would think… what? the young man wondered, terrified.

“…you could do better.” The old man answered the boy’s unspoken question, his tone crisp. “Amateurs. That is what you are. A bunch of amateurs.”

A sound the young man had heard once before: a pin being drawn.

It came again, then a third time.

Huh? he thought.

The old man left the security room. On his way out he turned and fired a 9mm bullet into the young man’s head, just like that. The young man jerked backwards, then fell, causing the grenade he was sitting on to explode. A second later the three grenades on the video recorder were going off, one after the next, destroying all evidence.

Two minutes later, the old man was in the back garden.

He stood before a low, gray, concrete enclosure. A row of cages with chain-link doors, some open, some closed. He had passed four dead Doberman pinschers on his way here. They had been poisoned. He himself had carefully stirred the poison into their food. There were still some dogs in the kennels, though, alive. He had killed the adults, but not the puppies.

They were barking. Their young voices. The old man stared at them through the chain-link doors.

He watched them for half a minute, then nodded to himself, opened a door, stepped inside. He scooped up an armful of puppies.

The attack on the mansion was all over the media the next day. The first reports were vague, mere repetitions of statements issued by the government. That weekend, a fringe newspaper ran a sensational version of the story on its front page. The provocative headline announced OPPOSITION GROUP RESPONSIBLE. The article said an organization “specializing in bomb attacks” had targeted the residence of a “Vor,” the head of a major criminal organization that operated two banks, three hotel chains, and numerous restaurants. The article commented provocatively on the group, which, it said, had sold weapons pilfered from army warehouses. It continued with a lengthy profile of the criminals who were presumed to have killed the Vor, who had, by and large, taken control of this city in the Russian Far East. The article concluded: “At last, the epic battle has arrived on our doorstep, here at the edge of Siberia—a war between the two great forces of the underworld, old and new: the Russian mafia and the Chechen mafia.”

Dogs, dogs, where are you now?

For the first forty days of 1944, they remained on Kiska. There were only seven of them now. On January 2, one dog died. Explosion. This female German shepherd had been too weak, after the surgically aided birth she had undergone, to survive the brutal Aleutian winter. During the first six or seven weeks, while the five puppies born alive were still suckling, she tried her best to raise them. But when the time came to wean them, she lost strength. Finally, shortly before dawn on the second day of the new year, she died.

The Americans had already figured out who she was. The previous year, when the Japanese military launched the second stage of its Ke-gō Operation, evacuating its forces en masse from Kiska/Narukami, it had blown up the factories, garages, ammunition, and other munitions that had to be left on the island. But they hadn’t gotten everything. They ran out of time. More than fifty-two hundred members of the island’s garrison had to be loaded into the rescue fleet’s ships in just fifty-five minutes. The troops could take only the most essential personal belongings, so any number of notebooks, diaries, and other papers remained in the camps. Important classified documents were burned, of course, but they couldn’t dispose of the rest.

As soon as the Americans had retaken the island, they had the landing force’s intelligence officers translate what they found. Several documents indicated that Explosion had originally been an American military dog until she was captured by the Japanese on Kiska. “We seized a dog from a US Navy private (a prisoner) at the wireless station,” one reference explained. “Her name is Explosion.” The Alaska Defense Command conducted an inquiry into her provenance under the jurisdiction of the Navy Flotilla 13.

And so, once again, Explosion was an American.

What about the others? They all belonged to the Americans, of course. They were fed by the Americans, cared for by the Americans. But in the end, they hadn’t actually become American military dogs. The five puppies were treated as pets by the garrisoned forces, not as fighters, and since the two adults—the German shepherd Masao and the Hokkaido Kita—were military dogs, the Americans considered them Japanese, and prisoners.

Not that this was a bad thing.

The dogs weren’t overly concerned with the instructions war minister Tōjō Hideki had laid down in the Field Army Service Code : “Do not live to endure the prisoner’s humiliation.” Neither Masao nor Kita felt particularly humiliated. They saw how Explosion responded to commands in English, and within a week or two they had learned to answer the commands the American troops garrisoned on Kiska issued. They were almost perfect. The soldiers adored them. The two dogs weren’t humiliated, they were treated like kings.

February 10, 1944. Seven dogs. Having been stationed for approximately six months on the island, the troops were ordered on to their next field of battle. As they boarded the transport ships that had pulled into Kiska Harbor, the seven dogs went with them.

The twentieth century: a century of war, a century of war dogs. These dogs did more than simply die on the battlefields. They took prisoners and were taken. It happened all the time on the front lines. Dogs were captured. Trained in battle, bred in all sorts of ways, developed, perfected, the dogs were crucial, secret weapons. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Germany seized mastiffs from all over Belgium, which it had conquered, and inducted them into their military, where they were used to pull guns and carts—tasks German dogs were unable to perform. All along the Eastern and Western Fronts, Europe’s great powers busied themselves snatching whatever types of dogs their own armies lacked. The situation was the same during the Second World War. Germany, for instance, still the most advanced nation in terms of its dogs, had compelled almost every dog in the French military to turn on its homeland by the time Germany conquered France.

The seven dogs on Kiska would be sent to the mainland. Two as “prisoners” captured on the front lines, the remaining five to be trained as “candidate military dogs.” The dog-training unit of the Marine Corps was especially interested in the puppies. They couldn’t wait to see how good these animals would be—a new generation born of two purebred German shepherds, the first (Explosion) American and the second (Masao) a sample of the sort of dog that Japan, with its admittedly greater experience in this area, was sending into the field. The order had been issued for the dogs to be shipped to the mainland precisely for this reason.

If things went well, all seven dogs would be retrained at a Marine Corps camp and emerge from the experience as American military dogs.

Not prisoners, not candidates. Full-fledged military dogs.

The seven dogs had been brought onto one of the transport ships, but no kennels or beds had been prepared. For the time being, they were simply chained to the bridge. The puppies, less than four months old, were terrified. Not that this mattered, of course; the fleet departed anyway. The ship’s first stop would be Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska Island, over four hundred miles away.

Three miles brought it outside Kiska Harbor.