Another duty it for which it had also found itself unmatched in the passing week or so since the outbreak of war was that of high-altitude interception. With a service ceiling greater than any single-engined fighter in service with either the army or navy, the Ki-45 was markedly faster and more manoeuvrable than any Allied bomber or long-range patrol aircraft, and the few Toryu units stationed within the Japanese Home Islands had quickly found themselves in high demand.
Already an ace courtesy of his previous experience in China, Miyamoto however recognised right from the outset that this was no ordinary interception. To begin with, the enemy was flying at least 10,000 feet higher than any Allied aircraft he’d ever before encountered, and there was also the fact that it was approaching at a speed great enough to rival that of many fighters.
There was still no concern in his mind at that point that the target he’d been despatched to intercept was anything other than a reconnaissance flight. It was certainly big – at least as large as a medium or heavy bomber – however it was not unknown for the Allies – particularly the United States – to make use of aircraft of that size for the purposes of strategic reconnaissance, as smaller, fighter-sized aircraft generally possessed neither sufficient range nor service ceiling to be suitable for the task.
They’d sighted the interloper almost immediately upon take-off, the long, white contrails clearly visible against the cloudless sky at ranges well beyond a hundred miles, however it was only as Miyamoto closed to within thirty or so that he began to feel that something was very wrong about the whole thing.
The enemy pilot was making no effort to evade for one. He only needed to turn his head to see what he already knew – that he and his wingmen were trailing similar contrails behind their own aircraft that would stand out just as clearly against the backdrop of an empty sky – and quite understandably, reconnaissance pilots usually tried to run when confronted with an immediate threat of interception. This fellow continued on regardless however, not wavering from his original course one iota as they two flights continued to close at a staggering combined rate approaching thirteen miles per minute.
As they continued to close, he also realised that this aircraft truly was huge – far larger than anything he’d previously seen – and also appeared to be an extremely unusual shape: something like a large arrowhead painted in an overall black colour scheme that gave it a completely featureless appearance at such a distance.
“Prepare yourselves!” He barked sharply over his radio, his wingmen knowing exactly what to expect. “The enemy is large and will be dangerous. Arm all weapons… we shall leave nothing to chance. Do not fail…!”
They were a minute apart as Miyamoto finally realised his quarry had nosed down and entered into a shallow dive, its silhouette almost disappearing into a thin, dark line at the head of those white contrails as it began to descend, accelerating at a prodigious rate. Now closing at fifteen miles per minute, the short window in which the Toryu’s guns were actually within range came and vanished in just a few seconds, and by the time Miyamoto and the others had even begun to react, it was already too late: they were caught completely by surprise, and none of them were able to follow the great, black craft as it swept past beneath them in a blur and they burst through its trailing exhaust in a shudder of sudden, unexpected turbulence.
“Kōmori,” he breathed softly, having caught a better view of the Boomerang’s broad wings and bat-like shape as it flashed past in a deafening roar. “Sugoi ne…!” He then quickly bellowed “Attack! Attack!” over the radio as he once more regained his composure and hauled back on the stick, bringing his fighter around and onto the enemy’s tail.
It was already too late. Just a handful of seconds lost, and the great, black bomber was already over a mile away and continuing to accelerate. Miyamoto nosed his fighter downward in pursuit and opened his throttles wide, the Toryu shuddering as it edged beyond its nominal top speed of 460 miles per hour, and still the enemy pilot continued to open the distance between them, as impossible as it seemed.
“Like some kind of great yōkai!” Miyamoto muttered almost fearfully to himself, a moment of superstition seeping into his consciousness. “Come on, men!” He barked angrily, steeling his own nerves. “We’ll chase this black demon back to the gates of jigoku itself!”
My goodness, that was rather close,” Trumbull breathed softly, that quintessentially English understatement drawing faint smiles from the rest of his crew. He’d taken the Boomerang directly beneath the oncoming enemy fighters, relying on the bomber’s incredible speed and their delayed reaction times, and had continued on at full throttle, a faint sheen of perspiration showing across his brow despite the intense cold within that bubble cockpit. “Status report, please?”
“Two thousand yards and increasing,” Patchett advised excitedly over the intercom. “They’ll not catch us now!”
“Let’s hope so…” Trumbull agreed with a weak smile, pulling back slightly on the joystick. “Levelling out at Angels-Three-Five. Weapon status please, Roger…?”
“Both weapons armed and ready, sir,” the bombardier replied instantly.
“Very good… I’ll be down there in a moment…”
Turning his head, Trumbull could see the tiny cranes and dock structures of Kure off to his left beyond the aircraft’s nose. Ke knew it was time, and delaying the inevitable would help no one. With a final sigh of resignation and a growing sense of dread within, he gently banked the Boomerang around to port and brought her onto a direct line of approach with the great, sprawling shipyards and naval base that lay ahead, thousands of feet below. Further off in the distance, ten miles beyond Kure and in direct line with their approach, the sprawling expanse of Hiroshima itself was also visible beneath the afternoon sun, and he felt a chill ripple through him.
“Turning onto final approach,” he added softly, reaching out and making sure that his throttles were all wide open as he flicked on the aircraft’s autopilot. “Co-pilot to the cockpit, please…”
He released his seat straps and began to climb down to the main flight deck, Flight Lieutenant Andy Jones already waiting and ready to take over as had already been discussed so many hours before, prior to take-off.
“You don’t need to do this, sir…” he suggested softly, concern showing in his own features.
“Oh, on the contrary, Andy: I most certainly do…” Trumbull replied with solemn sadness, momentarily resting a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Just keep her steady as she goes: there’s a good chap…”
He turned and headed for the very nose of the bomber as Jones clambered up into the pilot’s chair and returned the aircraft to manual control. The bombardier’s position held pride of place there, surrounded by glass panes that formed the bomber’s nose – the very joining point of the Boomerang’s huge wings – and Alec settled himself in over the Norden bombsight as the bombardier stood back to allow him access.
“Assuming control, pilot…” Trumbull advised as he connected his oxygen mask and plugged his intercom jack into the nearest available socket, staring down into the sight at the ground passing far below them. “Sixty-seconds to target…”
“You have controls, bombardier…” Jones responded immediately, addressing his CO by the title of the position in which he was currently acting. Although no expert by any means, the training Trumbull had undergone while developing the huge flying wing had left him reasonably proficient with most aspects of the aircraft’s operation, and as they all knew, accuracy would not be of any particular consequence for this mission.
“Thirty seconds, gentlemen,” he advised carefully, eyes never leaving the bombsight viewfinder. With a careful hand, he made a few adjustments to the sight’s elevation and lateral position, feeling the entire aircraft shift slightly in response as the automatic pilot responded to those changes.
Thirty-five thousand feet below, the coastline of Shimo-kamagari Island passed beneath them, still several miles south-east of Kure. With a single flick of a s
witch, the automatic release was armed, and it was a simple thing now to watch those crosshairs move across the island to the south of the central heights he remembered as Mount Ohira from the maps they’d studied. All that need be done now was to continue to adjust the sight’s aim point to remain stable and in line with their required course: the analogue computer that powered it would do the rest when the time came.
Flak began to burst below them, fired from heavy AA units based on the coast below. None of it was close however, and all of it fell short by at least a few thousand feet. None of the anti-aircraft units stationed within range of their projected flight path were equipped with weapons sufficiently powerful to reach so far beyond thirty thousand feet.
“Control, this is Miyamoto!” He barked urgently into his radio as the Boomerang continued to outpace them, dramatically opening out the intervening distance as it turned onto its final approach. “Enemy aircraft is a bomber… I repeat: this is a bombing attack!”
In the lieutenant’s mind, there was no doubt now that that strange, black aircraft was intent on making an attack on Kure – had reconnaissance been the primary concern, there would’ve been no need whatsoever to have come down from its original altitude at all – and regardless of that: the fact remained that its dark, ugly, appearance was just so alien to him that he couldn’t help but feel the danger and malevolence it exuded.
“Yes, I confirm, Control,” he assured, frustrated now as a higher-ranking officer at the other end questioned his judgement. “Sir, there is no doubt: this is an attack. All personnel should be ordered to shelters immediately.” There was a pause as a long and quite pointed reply came through, hardening his expression with shame and indignance. “Sir, we are at full emergency power already and we cannot catch this thing. Whatever it is, it is faster than anything we have, and we cannot stop it!”
He knew that that admission could possibly end his career, but that somehow hardly seemed relevant at that moment as he watched the huge flying wing continue to leave them behind, its tail gunner keeping his weapons trained on them the entire time. That it seemed they’d not even been deemed worthy of being fired upon as the two enemies had passed somehow made the entire situation far more humiliating.
For what it was worth, Miyamoto’s final warning was in any case quite pointless: although it was indeed dutifully passed on to the naval base watch commander, the initial delay and lack of time remaining ensured that there was no opportunity whatsoever for a new alert to even be properly raised, let alone reacted to.
“Weapon away!” Trumbull announced hoarsely, his throat suddenly dry. The Boomerang had lurched faintly as the 2,400-pound free-fall bomb had dropped from its internal bay and disappeared into the slipstream, and he’d almost flinched at the sensation, forcing himself to remain focussed as he adjusted the bombsight to their next target. “All non-essential flight crew will now assume special safety positions until ‘all-clear’ is given…”
At that moment, every crewman not directly involved in the current process of keeping the aircraft flying strapped themselves into whatever seat they were occupying and donned a set of thick, heavily-tinted dark goggles, just as they’d practised many times during that long, ten-hour flight. No gunners stood at their posts now, the XB-42 relying on its exceptional speed as its only defence for the time being.
“Thirty seconds…” Trumbull repeated again, knowing now it was a race against time as to which would come first – second release or initial detonation. Already, the outer residential areas on the city’s south-eastern fringe were passing through his viewfinder, and it wasn’t long before is next point of aim appeared ahead.
The Aloi Bridge: a distinctive, T-shaped crossing of the Ota River originally constructed just ten years before. Close to the centre of the city and easily recognisable from the air, it had seemed the perfect aiming point for their bombing run. It was Thorne who’d suggested it, when the mission had first been discussed at that early-morning meeting with the Princess and the British Prime Minister the day before, and he’d seemed strangely ill at ease at the time, although Trumbull had tactfully elected not to question him on that.
“Weapon release!” He called again, with far more urgency this time as the second and last of the weapons fell from the Boomerang’s bomb bay. “You have command again, Andy: take her back up to best altitude, if you would, and quickly please…”
He wasn’t looking directly out through the bomber’s glass nose at that moment, but Trumbull caught the aftereffects of the initial flash in his peripheral vision all the same. For a fleeting fraction of a second, it seemed the entire city below had been lit up by a giant flashbulb, shadows thrown starkly across the landscape to the north-west and then gone again, almost too fast for the eye to register.
In Realtime, the B83 bomb had been the largest thermonuclear free-fall weapon in service with the United States Air Force. Twelve feet long and weighing 2,400 pounds, its variable-yield warhead was capable of a maximum blast equivalent to 1.2 million tons of TNT. The Hindsight unit had brought three such weapons back with them from the future, and had attempted to use one against the Nazi High Command during 1940, in the last days leading up to the September 11 invasion of Great Britain.
The first weapon had proven to be a dud, and it had since been discovered that an unexpected side-effect of their journey back through time had been the complete neutralisation of the plutonium housed within the core of each weapon’s compact warhead, rendering all three completely useless. It had taken a crash program of research and experimentation in the two years that had followed to ultimately produce sufficient bomb-grade nuclear material to replace the two remaining inert cores, the culmination of which had been Hal Markowicz’ successful test at Maralinga, early in November.
The first weapon had taken the better part of a minute to fall the required distance to 7,000 feet, detonated by radar altimeter within a microsecond of reaching that altitude. The initial fireball, two thousand yards across, had surprisingly little effect so high above the ground, other than that it blinded anyone who had happened to be staring directly at it for miles around.
It was the blast radius that did the damage, rippling out to four miles in every direction at supersonic speed and destroying everything it encountered. Buildings, ships, trees and human beings were all shattered and torn apart as the intense heat instantly set their destroyed remains ablaze. Secondary explosions rose up all around as fuel dumps and ammunition stores detonated in that heat, adding to the growing miasma of wreckage and destruction as it was whipped up by the returning winds and sucked straight into the huge mushroom cloud that began to form above what remained of Kure.
Still standing at that dais, watching Taihō being manoeuvred out into the bay, neither Tōjō nor the rest of the official party present survived long enough to actually understand what had occurred, being crushed flat by the blast wave before their minds were able to even register what was happening. Around them, the dais, the marquees that had been erected and the surrounding warehouses themselves disintegrated as supersonic winds scoured the landscape like an invisible glacier.
Out beyond the slipway, Taihō’s flight deck and upperworks were shredded and ripped apart as her hull was smashed downward into the water by the force of the blast. None of the surrounding tugs survived: those that hadn’t immediately caught fire and exploded from the searing heat were swamped and capsized by huge waves created by the shockwave and by the carrier itself as its torn hull was forced down into the water, displacing tens of thousands of tons of suddenly-boiling water.
There were probably another hundred vessels of all sizes at anchor in the surrounding waters, from the smallest tug or tender through to several cruisers and the great battleship Kongō. The nearer ships, Kongō included, were capsized or torn apart as the shockwave spread outward, and many of those moored further away were also wrecked beyond repair. Most would either sink of their accord in the hours and days that would follow, while the remainder would ultimately
be deemed beyond recovery, to be scuttled by salvage crews in the aftermath.
Still in pursuit and now perhaps three miles behind the fleeing black bomber, Miyamoto and his wingmen were fortunate enough to not be facing the direction of flash as the weapon had detonated, although their aircraft were nevertheless close enough to be pummelled savagely by the shockwave that followed, thrown about the sky like ragdolls for a few tense seconds as they struggled to regain control of their machines. Circling high above Hiroshima, it was only as they turned back toward what was left of Kure that their minds were forced to comprehend what had actually happened.
“Maa ne…!” Miyamoto moaned softly, unable to find words adequate to describe the terror that had gripped him. “Owata…! Grandfather… help me…!”
Fifty seconds after initial detonation, the second B83 exploded at similar altitude above the centre of Hiroshima, vaporising all three aircraft in a microsecond.
With a destructive force eighty times that of the atomic bomb used against the city in Realtime 1945, the devastation wrought on the city below was beyond accurate measure. Like most Japanese cities of the period, generally only businesses or government buildings were constructed of anything as substantial as concrete and steel, none of which was in any case strong enough to resist the force of the blast that followed. Anything within two miles of the hypocentre was demolished completely, save for the gutted but still-standing remains of those few structures sited directly below the explosion.
The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3) Page 110
