“To all planes on the ground—this is the tower,” said the chief controller into the microphone. “Emergency! Cut your engines. An earthquake is coming.”
At that instant there was a sound like a thunderclap, and he was thrown from his chair.
“Take over for me,” he said in a hoarse voice to a colleague who came to his assistance. “Put the planes waiting to land in hold patterns. And get out of here. There’s a rough one coming.”
The first shock wave passed. No sooner had it done so, however, than up from the depths of the earth there came an uncanny groaning sound. The control tower, struck with a dreadful force, spun around as though upon a giant turntable. The assistant controller shouted desperately into the microphone to the planes circling above, but his voice was lost amid screams and crashes and the awful rumble of the earthquake.
At this same moment the American satellite Manned Orbiting Laboratory #3, having passed through the already bright Northern Pacific sky, was moving through the predawn darkness that still covered Japan at an altitude of seventy miles. The commander was monitoring the vast array of cameras and other instruments trained on the scene below. Two other crewmen were sleeping, and the fourth was peering out the observation window, watching through binoculars the smoke still pouring up from shattered Mount Fuji and the flickering points of fire that marked the newly active volcanoes strung through the central mountain ranges. With dawn just breaking, he found his vision obscured, and he switched on the night vision screen.
“Hey, look!” he shouted, grabbing the commander’s shoulder. “There’s something going on in Western Japan.”
The area covered by the screen was Ise Bay and the Kii Peninsula, south of Osaka. The commander turned to look over the man’s shoulder, and then he immediately switched to a wider coverage and started the video transmission.
“What’s the matter?” said a third man in a sleepy voice as he got out of his bunk.
“I don’t know. Get Pat up. We’ll need him. Look! The color of the water’s changing.”
On the almost black surface of the sea, just off the Japanese coast, blue-green splotches took form and then spread at incredible speed, moving east and west. And at the same time they began to move out into the Pacific, coalescing to form an advancing blue-green line behind which new splotches, light blue in color, began to appear. “Keep those cameras going. Jimmy, look out the other window.”
The fourth crewman, too, sprang into action. He threw switches on the control panel and fixed his eyes to the quivering needles, some of which began to spin erratically.
“Damn! This is really something,” he said, frantically making adjustments. “Both gravity and terrestrial magnetism are all screwed up. Bill, are we on the frequency of any ships in the area?”
“Yes. The LaFayette should be right below us. Should I tell them not to get too close to the coast?”
“My God!” cried the crewman with the binoculars. “Look what’s happening. Japan is breaking up!”
Before the horrified eyes of the four Americans, the outline of Shikoku and the southern part of the Kii Peninsula below suddenly seemed to blur slightly, as though trembling. The now blue surface of the sea became covered with small pale splotches, which spread out to the east and west, forming a single line. A shock sent a ripple over the surface of the ocean, and this, gathering up the splotches as it went, began to spread outward with awesome deliberation, a dark, sweeping curve.
“A tidal wave,” cried the crewman with the binoculars. The dark line of the wave spread across the blue surface of the ocean beneath them. It would strike the islands of Eastern Asia and even the coast of Chile.
“Hey, the southern coast of Japan is changing,” said the crewman at the movie camera.
“Pat! Get Houston,” shouted the commander, staring at the screen. “Tell them that Japan is going under.”
The southern portion of Shikoku and the Kii Peninsula along the structural fault line of the Yoshino and Kiino rivers had begun to move southeast into the Pacific, rocked by quake after quake. The rest of the Western Archipelago was moving too, but at a slower pace. The sea swept into the breach, and the Yoshino and the Kiino grew broader and broader. When the detached land mass reached the end of the continental shelf, it began to sink at the incredible rate of several yards an hour along a line some hundreds of miles long. Several hours after the first quake had struck, most of the towns along the southern coasts of Shikoku and the Kii Peninsula had disappeared, the ocean coming as far as the foot of Nachi Falls on the Kii.
The slippage between north and south along the central structural line gradually spread eastward. When the quake had struck Western Japan at dawn, the whole Central Region too, had experienced a medium-grade quake. Afterward the earth had continued to rumble in sinister fashion. Now at 10:47 a quake of like severity struck Central Japan, and a new fault developed on a line running from the mouth of Ise Bay to the Fuji River at the base of Mount Fuji. A tidal wave nearly thirty feet high swept into Sagami Bay, devastating the coastal cities. Destroying as they went, the ocean waters surged over the area depressed by the great eruption, moving along the line of the Fuji River as far as Fujinomiya.
A vast quantity of ocean water poured into the still-active Ashitaka volcano, southwest of the shattered slopes of Fuji. Mount Ashitaka shook throughout the day with minor eruptions, and then, at two in the afternoon, a thunderous explosion destroyed every vestige of it. The hostile elements clashed again, and firestorm and flood ravaged Central Honshu.
2
The television-equipped helicopter carrying Kataoka on a Plan D inspection mission crossed from the Kii Peninsula to Shikoku, following the fault line. The heavy rain brought on by the shock of the quake had slackened after an hour and a half, and Shiko-ku’s mountains had begun to show through the clouds. The helicopter pilot flew as low as he dared through the treacherous air currents, and as Kataoka looked down, he saw, through the breaks in the clouds, traces of the havoc below. He caught glimpses of ravaged earth and the dull, leaden glint of flooded fields. Furthermore, he could see any number of crevices cutting diagonally through the mountains from northwest to southeast. The green mountainsides were rent, exposing the raw texture of the earth beneath, red, brown, and black scars. In places the dark crevices seemed to gape open to incredible depths. It was as though giant hands had wrung the earth below like a mop. Kataoka could see landslides still taking place and steam boiling up from the crevices.
A colleague sitting beside him tapped his shoulder and pointed down. A passenger boat lay on its side in the rice paddies below. From such a height it was of course impossible to make out any people, but when Kataoka looked down at the red bottom of the stranded vessel, he thought of the crowds massed on the docks and shorelines that morning, fearful of what was ahead but relieved that their turn to leave had come, and a black depression took hold of him. His own family had been wiped out in an instant by the tidal wave that had followed the great Tokyo quake, and now he imagined he could hear the cries of his young brother and sister rising from the drowned fields below. He covered his ears with his hands.
“What’s the matter?”
“Take over for me, will you?” said Kataoka, getting up from the television monitor. “I have to vomit.”
At Plan D headquarters Yukinaga and Nakata were staring somberly at the television screen, watching the transmission from another helicopter, this one flying above stricken Osaka.
The three low-lying districts adjacent to the harbor were almost completely submerged. The water that covered them was an inky black, probably because the silt at the bottom of the bay had been churned up by the tidal wave. The dark water flowed through the city and, twisting and eddying as it went, surged farther inland. The factories and petroleum tanks clustered at the mouths of the rivers that flowed through Osaka had taken the brunt of the quake and the tidal waves. Some had been obliterated and others lay in ruins. And as Yukinaga and Nakata watched, those left standing were collapsi
ng one after another into the murky water that flowed around them. A floating dock, the ship that had been under repair still within it, lay upon what seemed to be Benten Pier like a ship run aground. Only a portion of the roof of the huge pier facility was still above water. A capsized ocean liner was jammed into a shattered street, its red bottom pointing upward. The black oil which lay like a blanket over the bay and was flowing into the city as well had begun to flame up here and there. Even in the wards somewhat removed from the waterfront, the water had reached the third and fourth stories of buildings.
The elevated expressways lay twisted and shattered. The supports of the section running through the Nakanoshima district in the center of the city had been torn away, and it lay beneath the murky water. In this area only the tops of trees and buildings were to be seen and a flat-bottomed riverboat, its prow stuck fast in the side of a building.
The black water that had worked so stunning a transformation of Osaka was now lapping at the high ground in the eastern section of the central city, where Osaka Castle and the government buildings stood, twisting its way toward the northeastern suburbs along the banks of the Yodogawa. And to the south, the turgid, backed-up waters of the Yamatogawa merged with those that had swept over the dikes to the north, and began to move relentlessly toward Ikoma Heights, to the east of the city.
According to legend, when the Emperor Nintoku had founded his capital, the waters of the bay had covered most of what was to be modern Osaka. And now after earthquake and tidal wave, at the foot of Takatsu Shrine, where ships had moored in ancient times, what looked like a roofed oyster boat lay tilted, its prow aground on the shrine steps.
The roofs of the apartment buildings were crowded with refugees, who looked up with grim, anxious expressions, waving and shouting at the helicopter flying overhead. The murky water that swept around the buildings was filled with corpses, bobbing in the midst of debris of every sort. Such was the force of the current that in some places automobiles were swept together into a mass blocking a street, and here the black water turned white as it raced over these obstacles.
“It looks like well have to fall back on Senriyama for a marshaling point” muttered Nakata as he watched the screen. “Get in contact with D-3,” he said to the radio operator. “Find out what they think. The Expo 70 grounds are big enough for both the big helicopters and the STOL planes. And find out what damage they’ve suffered.”
The operator struggled to get through to the Ground Defense Force at Itami, where the D-3 group was located. When Itami finally came in, the reception was bad and it was difficult to get the message. It seemed that all road traffic had been blocked as a result of damage done by the quake, and the large ponds in the area had overflowed, causing extensive flooding. As a result the refugees, some of them nearly out of their minds with desperation, were besieging the Ground Defense headquarters. A helicopter sent from the naval station at Maizuru had been destroyed by the crowd, and a young officer had lost his head and fired.
“Fired? Into the crowd?” shouted Nakata, jumping up and lunging toward the radio operator.
“No. Into the air, I think,” answered the distraught operator, trying frantically to maintain contact. “What happened was that the crowd turned on the soldiers then. Two were badly hurt. . . . No . . . one man was killed.”
“What’s the matter with the military down there?” shouted Nakata, angrily pounding his fist on the table. “Tell the commander that the officers have got to set an example. They’ve got to keep their heads!”
“Don’t get excited,” said Yukinaga. “They know what they’re doing.”
All at once the various pinging sounds that filled the communication room were drowned out by the emergency buzzer. There had been a time when this sound would have galvanized everyone, but now they heard it with weary resignation.
On the fluorescent map on the wall, two, then three red lights flashed on in the North Central Region.
“From Matsumoto . . . Mount Norikura erupted. Yake and Fudo are on the verge,” a technician reported- “That was at seven thirty, and right after, a report from Nagano ... in the direction of Mount Takazuma . . . eruptions along the western slope ... at eight three.”
“Takazuma?” Yukinaga whispered, taken aback.
“That’s sooner than we thought,” said Nakata, clucking his tongue and glancing up at the board. “We thought it would start there sooner or later. . . . Well, at any rate, it’s on both sides of the Itoigawa fossa magna now. Lateral movement is more than two yards. Everybody along the coast there should have been moved out by now.”
“I hope so, but . . .” muttered Yukinaga in a hollow voice as he gazed vacantly at the flashing red lights on the board.
The buzzer rang again. Two red lights flashed on the extreme northeast.
“From Morioka . . . Iwate and Koma starting to erupt,” came the technician’s voice, echoing mechanically through the room.
Yukinaga stood in front of the board as though he did not hear. The glowing map of the Japan Archipelago seemed to blur before his unfocused eyes and take on the form of a dragon. The spine of the dragon, the central mountain ranges, was speckled with orange dots glowing like an ugly pox. The familiar outline of the Archipelago was being altered drastically by the encroaching blue spreading over its coasts. And crossing it and recrossing were countless vertical, horizontal, and slanted lines, each scarlet stroke representing a structural break. The most recent had flashed on the board that morning, the slash running from the Kii Peninsula across into Shikoku. Scattered from one end of the main island of Honshu to the other, the red dots, which stood for eruptions, glowed like clots of blood. Off the coast of the Kanto Region, though the Izu Islands had been all but overwhelmed by the sea, more red dots marked the volcanic fires still bursting up from the ocean floor.
The dragon was stricken.
A fatal illness was eating at him, destroying his very marrow. Racked with fever, his vast bulk covered with bleeding wounds, he thrashed about, vainly struggling against the fate that was tearing at him. The encroaching blue sliding over him was like the shadow of death.
Yukinaga was lost in reflections of his own. His vacant gaze was now fixed on the North Central Region, where clusters of red lights were flashing insistently.
3
When Mount Takazuma erupted that morning, Onodera was flying over the North Central Region in a small Defense Force helicopter on an inspection mission. Since the entire population of the region had supposedly been evacuated, he and the pilot were startled to see a group waving up at them from in front of a mountain shelter house. They landed, and Onodera got out of the helicopter to discover three parties of mountain climbers, fourteen people in all, students and young office workers. They had come into the region despite the evacuation orders and had been trapped by the cumulative disasters and bad weather. Two of them had already died from injuries and exposure. A girl was ill with pneumonia, and a young man was badly injured.
Onodera was enraged: “What the hell did you people have in mind when you did this? Did you have any idea at all of what was going on?”
“Yes, we did,” said a youth with high cheekbones in a weary voice. “Our parents and everybody else tried to talk us out of it. But we love mountain climbing. It’s what we live for. If these beautiful Japan Alps are going to disappear from the face of the earth, we wanted to bid a last farewell to them. What’s so bad about that? We came knowing that we might die here, and, if so, well and good.”
“I see,” said Onodera, turning around and starting back to the helicopter. “Well, if that’s the way you feel, it’ll make things a lot simpler for us.”
Onodera’s mood was a bleak one. What’s happened to me? he thought as he returned to the helicopter. The memory of Reiko came to him, a memory that had to be repressed violently lest it tear at him. The day that he had run blindly out of Plan D headquarters, volcanic ash had been falling on Tokyo and the trains had stopped running. He had had but a single thought: to
get somehow from Tokyo to the Izu Peninsula, to the spot where Reiko had called from. He had run to the Defense Force helicopter base at nearby Ichigaya and demanded to be flown there. After an officer had refused him, Onodera had grown violent and had to be thrown off the base. Later, however, he had been able to get a ride on an armored troop-carrier. At Odawara, at the head of the Izu Peninsula, however, ash and falling rock had blocked the vehicle’s way. When Onodera had leaped down to the ground, his feet had sunk more than three feet into the gray wasteland. He had screamed out in frustration. After his return to Tokyo he had gone to Evacuation Headquarters and, disregarding the pleas of Nakata and Yukinaga, had demanded to be used in the most dangerous rescue missions. And so he had gone on these past weeks, sleeping and eating less than even his hard-driven companions, growing ever more haggard and desolate, and making a name for himself by the reckless heroism of his conduct. What am I doing to myself? he wondered groggily. I’m like a man already dead.
“Sergeant Tomita?” he shouted to the pilot above the roar of the rotor. “How many can we carry?”
“Two. Ordinarily it would be six, but there’s the equipment, and there’s no time to dismantle it.”
“Make it four. One of them’s sick. Two others are injured.”
“Can’t be done,” said the pilot, gesturing behind him. “No matter what you do, there’s not enough space for four.”
“I’ll stay here. So you can put one beside you and squeeze two more back there with the equipment somehow. You can do it, can’t you? And as for these other idiots, do you think you can get a helicopter to come from the squadron at Matsumoto?”
“No, I don’t think there’s any chance— But wait. A UH-1B is at Matsumoto Airport. It developed engine trouble the other day and had to stop for repairs. If it can fly, maybe I can have them send it. It would take all of you . . . but the problem of fuel . . .”
Japan Sinks Page 19
