July, 1941

“You’ve gotten the undivided attention of that Japanese man over there.” I looked where my attention not too subtly was being directed. The wiry man, who didn’t look fully Asian to me, was at least in his late forties and clothed in an expensive-looking suit that, though obviously tailored for him didn’t appear too comfortable on him. He looked like a military guy trying not to look like a military guy. He was sitting ramrod straight and alone at a table, although there were two younger, military-type Asian men standing at attention behind him. And it’s true that his beady eyes were boring into Claude and me. Claude somewhat maudlinly was pawing me as if this were our last meeting, which it undoubtedly was. The Frenchmen seemed to want to spend our last few minutes together declaring to everyone nearby that he had humped me.

Well, he had humped me a lot and with a great deal of self-confidence and domination.

“Let’s give him a real eyeful then,” Claude said, cupping my chin with the hand that wasn’t on the arm around the back of my chair in Rangoon’s The Strand Hotel dining room and stroking the tip of my shoulder. He took my lips with his and gave me a deep kiss. Pulling away from the kiss, he gave me an open-palmed slap across the face and came in for another kiss, which I accepted more hungrily than the first one. He had identified me in Le Havre, when I first took ship for the voyage to Burma, as a submissive who enjoyed a bit of pain and a lot of control. It was true that I was aroused by the exotic.

I’d been drinking wine and the French first officer of the ship I’d taken around the horn of Africa to the convergence of Burma’s Yangon and Bago Rivers was having a farewell dinner with me and the Burmese man who had met me at the ship when it docked here in Rangoon. It had been a long, boring sail and Claude had been very comforting to me in a rough sort of way that kept my engines humming. He had come off the ship to comfort me in my hotel room the previous night, but after dinner he’d have to return to his ship for the continued trip to Bangkok. The ship wasn’t going on to Malaya and Singapore this trip as the Japanese were poised to take those at any moment. Everything in the summer of 1941 in Southeast Asia and the Pacific was contingent on where the Imperial Japanese forces were moving next. No country seemed able to prevent their creation of a Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia. The crumbling British control of Burma certainly didn’t seem to be an impediment to a Japanese takeover here.

Claude and I were having a farewell dinner—I was sure I’d never see him again; it had purposely been a temporary and casual, meeting of unusual sexual interests, arrangement for both of us—in the hotel dining room with Saw Win, the middle-aged Burmese factotum David Atwell had sent to meet me in Rangoon and bring me up the Irrawaddy River to Pagan. It was Saw Win who observed that we were being observed.

Saw Win had been a complete surprise to me. His early-forties something was an older version of my twenty-four, when there couldn’t be many men like us roaming the world—maybe here in Burma, which was administered by England, but certainly not in the England from whence I had just come. We both were half English and half Burmese, although from our heritage and environment we were quite different beyond our exotic looks. I had been born and raised in England. Somewhat ironically this was my first visit to Burma. My father was a Devonshire squire and my mother a Burmese princess who had lived in London since she was a girl. Saw Win, on the other hand, was the son of a Burmese woman—David had hinted she was a woman of the night—and an English governmental clerk who had returned to London without her—or her son.

Claude and I had soon kissed our good-byes and he was gone back to his ship, his crisp-white nautical uniform and hunky build reducing the lantern-lit hotel dining room to a bit on the tawdry side with his departure. Saw Win slid over into the chair the Frenchman had vacated and leaned in to me. “It would not be good to attract too much of the Jap’s interest,” he murmured.

“Are you sure he’s Japanese?” I asked. “He doesn’t look completely Asian to me.”

“I’ve heard his father was German,” Saw Win said. “Mixed breed, like you and me. I suppose he can pass for either German or Japanese if he is determined to, but my sources say he’s a Japanese agent.”

“Even if so, why should I avoid him?” I asked. The man was attractive in a dangerous-looking way, and I had found that I was attracted to such men. Claude had seen that in me immediately—that I took my pleasure better when it included domination and a bit of pain. I had been initiated in that early in life, at fourteen.

I was here ostensively as a feature’s magazine writer, looking for side interests to write about in addition to visiting the great English artist, David Atwell, who had deserted Europe for life in the Southeast Asian jungles. And my interests on this trip went even deeper than Atwell or Saw Win knew or, I hoped, imagined. The British Intelligence Corps—the Int Corps—had been formed the previous year to gin up military intelligence in a period that inevitably was leading into another international war, and I was one of its recruits. And David Atwell was my focus of interest in coming to Burma, because, in addition to being an acclaimed landscape and portrait artist, he established himself some time ago as a gifted and quick cartologist. His skills were needed by the military and, as I had been a family friend of his since I was fourteen, I was being sent to try my luck at luring him back to England and to service in the Int Corps with an “all will be forgiven” offer.

That Atwell hadn’t just been a family friend from a neighboring estate when I was fourteen but had also been the man, with a fetish for boys, who had seduced me and taken my anal virginity at fourteen and held me as his sexual slave throughout that year, keeping me on the edge over the year by progressing from fucking me to binding and fucking me, to binding and spanking me with his hand and flogging me with a riding crop and fucking me, all of which I came to enjoy and that enhanced my arousal. But that part of our relationship was neither here nor there as far as the Int Corps was concerned and was, I assumed, not known to the corps. As Japan had been spreading its control over the region since the summer of 1940, with the takeover of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and the December silent subjugation of Thailand, checking up on any activity had were pursuing in Burma had been voiced in Int Corps headquarters as a side interest for me to look into while I was here, Thus, I was interested in any Japanese man, especially in one with two young military-looking men standing at attention behind him, who I encountered in my Burma travels.

“He claims to be an importer drumming up business throughout Southeast Asia,” Saw Win murmured, “but we all know he’s a Japanese general and that he’s scouting the English defenses here in Burma—which are nil, I can tell you. His name is Hoshi Nakamatsu, although he goes by the name Hans Brandt and claims to be Swiss. That alone is suspicious. A bit of checking justified putting a ‘general’ title in front of that. And I understand he’s a cruel man with special sexual interests.”

That piqued my interest. I didn’t suppose Saw Win would understand that it did. However, if he was serving David Atwell and had been told I was the man’s friend, he must have his suspicions. He seemed a man with a lot of suspicions to have.

“He sounds intriguing,” I whispered back, giving Saw Win a saucy smile that made him scowl. And, indeed, what Saw Win had to say about the man was intriguing, both on the military side and concerning his sexual interests. I had already discerned from the reaction he’d shown to Claude kissing and fondling me—and particularly to the slap that he gave me and that I willingly endured—that the Japanese general’s sexual interests extended to other men, to rough treatment, and to me, in particular. It wasn’t Claude’s departing hunky figure the man claiming to be the Swiss Hans Brandt had been looking at. He’d continued focusing his attention on me as Claude strutted off the scene.

“My job is to get you to Mr. Atwell in Pagan safely,” Saw Win said. “And I see no reason to respond to that man as anything more than a Japanese agent.”

“And my job is to gather interesting articles along the way,” I responded, giving Saw Win a calm smile. “There could be a good article in this.” There also could be sterling intelligence to send back to London, I thought, but Saw Win wasn’t someone to tell that too. I had no idea what Saw Win’s interests were as yet. He was a good-looking man, almost like my looking in the mirror in twenty years and seeing how I’d hoped I would mature. But he still was inscrutable. He was serving David Atwell, and I well knew that David, who had a fetish of painting fourteen-year-old boys in the nude and then fucking them as he did with me when I was fourteen, wouldn’t be easily cured of his desires. But I don’t know whether that still was central to the man’s life and, whether or not it was, where this Saw Win fit into the mix.

“Nevertheless, it would be prudent for you to stay as far away as—”

Saw Win got no further, however, because one of the ramrod-straight young Asian men in attendance to the importer, who also might be a Japanese general, was standing by me at the table.

“Excuse me. You are Gordon Talbot, are you not? A journalist?”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “I write feature articles for English magazines, yes.” So, the interest in me had extended to having, sometime in the past day, checked the hotel roster and even more than that.

“With the compliments of Mr. Hans Brandt. He wishes to talk to you about some writing ideas. Would you join him after dinner in the hotel bar?”

“I’m afraid—” Saw Win started to say, but I placed my hand on his forearm to forestall his refusal.

“Yes, I would be delighted to,” I answered. I had more than one job to do.

“Are you interested in helping with an article on Japanese influence in Asia—something more in terms of international economics than anything political?” I asked as I sat across from Nakamatsu at the cocktail table in The Strand’s Bamboo Bar. I had to agree with Saw Win that it would be prudent to think of the man only in his Japanese persona. He appeared more Japanese close up than he did from afar. He didn’t seem to want to press a Swiss—or German—connection. Considering what was happening in the world, it wasn’t any more a concern that a man would claim to be German as it was to claim to be Japanese.

I purposely sat across from him so that I could observe him. He wasn’t a tall or substantial man and, with the slash scar from an ear down to the corner of his mouth, I couldn’t say that he was a handsome man either, although he must have been when he was younger and more innocent. He clearly was of mixed race, which helped me to take an interest in him, as I was as well. He also clearly, from the looks he gave me, wasn’t an innocent. That didn’t put me off him in the least.

I could see that he was a man of steel, hard-bodied and sitting ramrod straight. He had a bottle of whiskey and shot glass in front of him, and he took full shot glances in one chug. I had little doubt that the scar was a badge of honor for him, acquired in a saber duel of some sort. Saw Win probably was right about him being a general rather than an importer—and connected with the Japanese. As I was taking out a notepad and pen, I was trying to frame this as an economic-interest feature, but both of us had the regional political imperialism of Japan on the tips of our tongues. He wasn’t shy about talking the subject. We both knew Japan was poised to gobble up the Malay peninsula in the new year and the Philippines as well. He spoke of that with an attitude of pride. It couldn’t be long after that that Burma itself would be in Tokyo’s sights.

Nakamatsu had a wad of British ten-pound notes in his hand and was slowly doling them out on the top of the table. There were five of them there when I sat down.

It didn’t take him long to move the conversation to the person and then, quickly, to the sexual. “I am surveying Burma for its potential in the Swiss export trade, Mr. Talbot. It would be advantageous to have a journalist travel with me and record my findings, possibly for publication, and it would be especially advantageous for the journalism to be a Burmese guide.”

“Ah, well,” I answered. “I can’t help you with that second part. I’ve only now arrived in Burma myself. I’m not fully Burmese. I’m half English.”

“Ah, that explains the exotic look of you, then,” he said. “And is that your father I saw you—you and the French sailor—with in the dining room?”

“No,” I laughed. “He is to be my guide in Burma. It was my mother who was Burmese, although she was raised in England. My father was English.”

“Ah, then, the man with you and the Frenchman was your procurer.”

“Excuse me?” I said, taken completely off guard.

“The Frenchman is bedding you, isn’t he? And with a great degree of confidence and control. I believe he dominates you and you enjoy being submissive. And the Burmese gentleman—half Burmese as you are, I would surmise—was with you and appeared to condone your relationship with the Frenchman. So, I take it that he makes these arrangements for you. Don’t take umbrage. That is what I’m more interested in than a guide—or even as a journalist. I wish to have the comforts of having a young man in my bed while I tour the country—preferably an experienced young man. You and I are similar—one foot in Europe and the other in Asia. We could benefit each other.” He made a grand gesture of adding two more ten-pound notes to the pile on the table, and I now understood why he was doling out the money. It was mine for the taking—with conditions. “I am also a dominant,” he added, slitting his eyes and giving me a tight smile. “I could bring the passion out of you.”

“I’m not a prostitute,” I said. “I’m a journalist, here to find an old acquaintance who my editors are interested in featuring in an article—an artist. I’m not a prostitute working the guests at The Strand.”

“Ah, yes, you’re here to find and interview David Atwell, I understand.”

That put me back on my pins. “You are well informed,” I said when I had recovered.

“We both know why David Atwell is living in Burma, don’t we?” Nakamatsu said, laying another ten-pound note on the pile, which was now up to eighty pounds, a generous price for a prostitute even on the streets of London at that time. I would have imagined it was good for a higher-class courtesan in Burma—or one who would be willing to serve a man’s special, and demanding, needs. “And I’ll wager that the reason you believe you can find Atwell and convince him to let you write about him is for the same reason I saw you letting the Frenchman take such liberties with you. You have been covered by Atwell, haven’t you?” Another ten-pound note landed on the pile. “And I understand he inflicts pain as well as passion.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said after a pause while the two of us eyeballed each other. “As I’ve said, I’m not a prostitute.”

“But you make no effort to deny that you take a man’s cock. Not even any embarrassment that I am even now trying to buy your ass. You were how old when Atwell bedded you?”

“Fourteen.”

“And he bound you in sex and inflicted a bit of pain?”

“Yes.”

“And that gave you an extra surge of pleasure?”

I didn’t answer that, but, in not answering, he got the one he sought.

“You have gone freely with men since then?”

“Yes. By choice, not for pay.”

“I wish to pay for it, and I pay well. It gives me license to take it to the edge of testing, and I enjoy bringing passion out of whores.”

I shivered. I didn’t know how he knew it, but I went into higher realms of satisfaction with testing and cruelty. The Frenchman had fisted me across the Indian Ocean, and I had stayed with him in preference to other offers. He had brought passion out of me with his fist, holding it in there, letting it pulse and fingers flex as I lay captive to him, on the edge of splitting. I’d never before experienced the rolling orgasm Claude ripped from me with his fist.

Sensing that I was weakening to him, Nakamatsu continued. “You are a handsome young man—the Burmese-English mix is quite exotic, extremely arousing. It has gotten my juices going. Shall we say a hundred pounds then? More than the price of a good prostitute. The price of a courtesan willing to serve special needs.” The tenth ten-pound note found its way on the top of the pile. I looked at it and then up into his face, with its serene, slightly cruel, self-confident visage. “I assure you I’m quite good—if a little extreme in my tastes. I will dominate you. You will be totally used. I will lift you to new levels of passion.” The eleventh ten-pound note dropped.

He reached over and ran his fingers down my forearm. When he reached the wrist, he dug his fingernails into my flesh. I winced, but he could see my eyes flash as well. He laughed and took his hand away.

It wasn’t just the cruel sex that was being offered, and the money meant nothing to me at all beyond the little extra thrill it would provide of playing the prostitute. Nakamatsu clearly was a dangerous man, and it was quite evident now that he wasn’t in Burma to open trade. He was here to scout the country for vulnerabilities to Japanese attack and occupation. And he was here to indulge in sexual release he could not as easily obtain in Tokyo. I had roles to perform here in Burma beyond writing—or fucking. It would be advantageous to keep close to Nakamatsu when possible. You can’t be any closer to a man than when he has your wrists bound and his cock inside you.

“If you wish,” I answered, lowering my eyes to see only the top of the table and the pile of banknotes. It was an act of surrender well known to dominants and submissives alike. That last—being dominated, commanded, and totally used by a military man—had pushed me over the edge.

I had no trouble finding Nakamatsu’s room after I’d gone back to mine and bathed and prepared myself. I wore just baggy white cotton trousers with a white cotton tunic over it and sandals on my bare feet. I figured I wouldn’t be clothed for very long. When I got to the corridor Nakamatsu’s room was on at The Strand, I could clearly see that one of his guards was standing attention at the door. I wondered where the other one was but then I figured that the general—excuse me, the exporter—had round-the-clock protection so the other soldier was probably taking his turn in the sack—while I took a turn in Nakamatsu’s sack. I gave a little shiver at the thought of the adventure that was to come. I’d never been fucked by a Japanese before. I wondered how well they generally were equipped.

The soldier stood at attention until I reached the door and then he put an arm out and opened the door for me. Nakamatsu was sitting, presumably cross-legged, in the center of a large bed. He was swathed in a billow of kimono in various shades of blue. The pattern was one of stylized ocean waves in a pattern that was both modern and from time eternal. There was no doubt the material was expensive. He was completely covered saved for an upcurved erection that parted the folds of the kimono at his crotch. He was encasing the root of the shaft with one of his hands and slow stroking himself. I still didn’t know how well Japanese men generally were equipped, but this one was hung. I also was able to see the Japanese in the man now—exotic and arousing; something new for me. I was lost to lying down for him and giving him whatever he wanted.

“Disrobe, please,” he said as his guard shut the door behind me, remaining on the corridor side. I did so; it didn’t take very long. “You are a beautiful young man. Turn for me.” I did. “Come service me.” I did that too, coming over to the bed, sitting at the foot of it, and leaning over and taking his cock in my mouth. He grasped the back of my neck with a hand of steel, holding me in place as I sucked him. He held me there in that grip, slowly rocking his pelvis to move his shaft in my throat, for several minutes until he had come for the first time. If I had thought that, because of his age, that would be all there was to it, I would have been terribly mistaken.

After coming and while he was recovering, he ran his hand over my body, exploring every mound and crevice until I was moaning and begging for him to fuck me. He only took that for a signal to begin his cruel games, though. While he was fondling and manipulating my body, all the time still swathed in his blue kimono and me completely naked, he moved me to where I was on my back, my buttocks in his lap and my arms raised over my head, my hands gripping the rails of the headboard while his fingers, greased with a scented lubricant, played in my ass, opening me up and stretching me. He was in to the knuckles and I was groaning, thinking he was going to fist me, when he leaned over me, brought leather restraints out from underneath a pillow at the top of the bed and secured my wrists there. He came out from underneath me then, but only briefly as he secured my ankles to leads to the edges of the footboard. I was completely under his control and at his mercy then.

When he came back onto the bed, he was carrying a thick ivory dildo, in the shape of a well-endowed cock but with a bulge half way down it. I whimpered as he greased the dildo up and then, when he’d moved back under me, with my buttocks in his lap, I cried out as he penetrated and fucked me with the dildo. He stroked my cock with his free hand, and he continued with this until, my having gotten into the taking, I dug my heels into the mattress and rocked against the rhythm of the dildo fuck. I gave a little cry and shot my load.

If I then thought that was all he would do, I was wrong. He didn’t release me. He came out from underneath me again. But he was gone for only a few minutes, returning with a leather box. When Nakamatsu, back in place under me with my buttocks in his lap, opened the box, I saw that it contained metal sounding wands inserted in grooves in a silky material. I knew what a sounding wand was. It originally was meant for medical purposes to open the urethra channel of a male penis to clear obstructions. Men like Nakamatsu, though, had taken the sounding wand over to use for sexual torture and stimulation. They twirled various thicknesses and lengths of the wands into their own or someone else’s urethra channel for the pain-pleasure of an exotic form of masturbation or fucking.

I started to hyperventilate. It wasn’t all about being sounded. I’d tried that before. And it wasn’t about being scared Nakamatsu didn’t know how to do it without causing damage. He exhibited as a professional in sexual torture. It was everything together: his intensity, his detachment, his military bearing—and the setting, being in a remote, exotic country, bound, and entirely at his mercy. And it was about me and what aroused me, as well. It was a growing fear and delicious anticipation of what he could move on from here to do without anyone to stop him.

With me hyperventilation could be a form of sexual anticipation, satisfaction, and release. Here, now, with this Japanese sadist, it was all of that.

I shuddered and trembled and moaned as he admonished me and, holding me fast draped across his lap, his kimono open now and I pressed into his hard-bodied gauntness, slowly twirled the first, the smallest, metal wand into my piss slit and deep into my urethra canal. “Relax,” he murmured. “Don’t fight it. You’ll regret.”

There was no question that I was fully under his control. I panted hard, moaning and murmuring, “Shit, fuck, FUCCK!” I did what I could to relax. I had been here before. I groaned as the wand came out, only to be replaced by the next thickest and longest one—and then the next after that. His lips captured mine, backing off only at the exchange of a wand for the next larger one. He was possessing me fully, scaring the shit out of me. It was delicious. I didn’t know if I could endure it. I dare not scream. I’m sure the only one who would respond would be Nakamatsu’s own man outside the door.

Nakamatsu was panting too—and groaning. At some point he could take no more and the last of the ever-thicker wands came out, he set it aside, and he moved between my spread thighs; grasped, separated, and lifted my buttocks to give him good access; thrust inside me, and fucked the hell out of me to his ejaculation. I had already shot a load, burbling up the cum of an ejaculation as he was extracting the last of the sounding wands.

After he came, he remained there, clutching me and panting, looking intensely into my eyes, until he had calmed down. He got out from underneath me then and went back to the suitcase that had produced the ivory dildo and sounding case. He pulled out a hand whip, with leather thongs tipped by metal. He came back to the bed and lightly dragged the thongs over my bare chest and thighs. He gave a little snap of the whip on my cock and balls and I jerked and yelped.

“This would be a good time, I think,” he said, “for you to tell me in more depth what your mission is here in Burma. You are, are you not, an agent of your country’s new military spy group. What’s the name?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I responded through ragged gasps. “I don’t know anything about a spy group. I’m here as a journalist to cover stories.”

He flicked my cock and balls again and I lurched, straining at the bonds that had me spread-eagled on my back, and yelped again.

“We have time,” Nakamatsu said with a smile. “I have to relieve myself. I see that there might be a bit of work ahead of us tonight. Don’t go away.” He laughed again, went into the adjoining bathroom, and closed the door.

Almost immediately another door across the room from there opened. I had taken glancing notice in a scan of the room before. If I’d thought about it, I would have thought it was some sort of closet. There was a standing wardroom right beside the door, putting it into the shadows, so there was no need for a closet. It didn’t lead to a closet. It led to the adjacent hotel room.

Saw Win was standing in the doorway. He held a knife in his hand. He put a finger of his other hand to his lips to tell me to be silent and then he stole into the room, cut my bonds, helped me gather up my clothes from the floor in front of the door to the corridor, and guided me into the adjacent room. He shut and locked the door from the adjacent room side, and while I quickly pulled my trousers, tunic, and sandals on, he showed me a French window leading out onto a balcony.

By the time Nakamatsu returned to his room to start an interrogation that surprised the hell out of me, Saw Win and I were on the ground outside the hotel and he was leading me to a pedicab that would take us deep into the backstreets of Rangoon to a house of safety. He’d thought of everything. My suitcase was packed and waiting for me in the pedicab.

We were out before dawn and at the small Rangoon airport to fly to the even smaller airstrip in Pagan, the ancient capital of an empire in the ninth through the thirteenth centuries on the left bank of the Irrawaddy River and now the home of a thousand ancient temple ruins. It was here that David Atwell had retreated to paint. Our plane was a twin-engine, fourteen passenger Boeing 247, which made the round trip twice a day. We took the early morning flight, because Saw Win was distressed by what had happened with General Nakamatsu and the man’s supposition of why I was in Burma, which I knew was more than just a supposition, and he wanted to slip out of Rangoon as quickly and quietly as possible. I don’t know how long Saw Win had been listening at the door or why he didn’t try to save me earlier.

Atwell was not at the airstrip to meet us in Pagan, which both Saw Win and I had expected him to be, but there were pedicabs there to meet the morning flight, and we took two for the trip into the field of temples to a hillside cottage where, I was told, Atwell spent most of his year. He wasn’t there now, though.

“He’s gone up to Mandalay where he also keeps a house,” Saw Win told me after consulting with Atwell’s two young houseboys. “He says the atmospherics weren’t right to meet with you here. There won’t be a plane going up there for several days, so we will take a riverboat in the morning. It’s only ninety miles up to Mandalay from here. Meanwhile, make yourself comfortable. If there’s anything you want—anything—just ask the houseboys, Bo Khin and Aung Zhan. They are both fourteen and very accommodating.”

He gave me a meaningful look when he said this, and I blushed. I no longer wondered what David Atwell had told him about our relationship and my resultant fetish, which matched Atwell’s—a desire to lie with fourteen-year-old boys, the age I was when Atwell took my virginity. Both of the houseboys were beautiful young men, and I had little doubt how Atwell used them—or what license I was being given to use them as well.

Of course, I wouldn’t succumb to my instincts, though. I would resist, as I’d been able to do in England for years since I had visited Atwell during my early university days at his country estate and covered his fourteen-year-old stable boys just as he was doing—and handling them roughly just as he was doing and as he done with me.