I think that the language, and particularly the phrasing, jolted the airmen even more than the actual capture. Colonel Faulkner kept shaking his head and murmuring "My God!" for several moments, and then pulled himself together. "So the story's really true after all," he finally said. "We got it on the radio day before yesterday at Manila. It was so garbled at first that nobody could make any sense. Ships reported thousand foot men wading in the ocean. New Macassar radio reported that Buddha was reincarnated, and then denied the story. Announcements of a pitched battle at Singapore, and frantic reports from every town on the peninsula. Then a statement by some Lama on Macassar that the British had kidnaped Buddha, had him hypnotized or doped, and were using him to exterminate China."
He paused and looked up at Kazu, who had bent down until his face was only a hundred feet above us.
"Part of it is true," said Baker. "There was a giant wading in the ocean. As to the rest, I fear we have caught the red radio without a script. I'll tell you the story presently, but just now there are more urgent things to do. Is your radio working?"
Faulkner nodded and led us towards the plane. Baker continued.
"Briefly, Kazu is a mutation produced by the Hiroshima bomb. He's been groomed for twenty years to take over as the world's largest puppet, but it turns out he has a mind of his own. We just happened along, and are going on for the ride. Want to join the party?"
The Colonel grinned for the first time as we all squeezed into the radio compartment of the plane.
"I like travel," he said. "It's so broadening."
The radio was not only operative, but proved most informative as well. Every transmitter on earth, it seemed, was talking about the giant. In the course of an hour we listened to a dozen major stations and got as many versions of the story. The communist propaganda factory had obviously been caught flat footed, for their broadcasts were a hopeless mixture of releases evidently prepared for the planned introduction of Buddha to the world, and hastily assembled diatribes against the capitalist imperialists who had so foully captured him. Some of the Russians apparently were not in on the secret of Buddha's dimensions, for they described in detail how a raiding party of eighty American commando-gangsters had landed by parachute on Yat, seized Buddha, and taken him away in a seaplane.
Before we went to sleep that night, Kazu extinguished the fire so that no one else would be attracted as the Colonel had been.