Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  It was encouraging, however, this small lift in spirits he received from contemplating what might be done, outclassed though they might be. They would lose the battle for these islands-of that he was in no doubt. But perhaps, with some luck, he could make it a Pyrrhic victory for the Allies.

  “So you will concentrate on the Clinton?” he pressed.

  “On the Clinton and the other carriers in the first instance. And on the troop transports in the second. I studied the history of the Falklands War from the nineteen eighties,” Onishi said, “and I believe that if the Argentineans had concentrated on sinking the British transports, rather than her destroyers and frigates, they would have kept those islands. We see that point made again with the Chinese attack on Taiwan in the following century, except that there the rebels did concentrate on the Communist transports, and prevailed because of it.”

  Yamamoto said nothing. He, too, had studied the conflicts of the coming decades, examining them for whatever insight they might give him regarding new opponents. And Onishi seemed to be forgetting that it was Americans like Kolhammer-possibly it even was Kolhammer-who had turned the Taiwan Straits into a mass grave for the Communist Chinese.

  “Send me the full report on your preparations, Admiral,” Yamamoto said. “I should like to study it this afternoon, before I contemplate the final disposition of the fleet.”

  “Hai!” Onishi barked in reply, firing off a series of commands to his juniors to see that a full briefing was made ready for the grand admiral.

  Yamamoto returned to studying the map table again, stifling another sigh as he watched the noose tightening around his neck. To the south, MacArthur was straining at the leash with an Allied army of one and a half million men. To the west, China had collapsed into a civil war between the Nationalists and Mao’s Red Army, after the effective withdrawal of Japan from Manchuria. And to the east, somewhere to the east, Spruance was in the final days of building a titanic force, a fleet such as the world had never seen. An armada that could have swept aside the great Combined Fleet that Yamamoto had led to Midway, in the days before the Emergence.

  He could not match that force.

  But could he cripple it? Could he hurt it badly enough that his enemies might be delayed long enough to secure the empire?

  Grand Admiral Yamamoto did not know.

  D-DAY + 16. 19 MAY 1944. 1410 HOURS.

  CAROLINE ISLANDS.

  The camouflage was impressive, but that was no guarantee of success. The Americans enjoyed unbelievable advantages in surveillance technology.

  Lieutenant Seki Yukio knew that his men could not afford to harbor any doubts about the success of their mission. Even so, he often found himself awake late at night, wondering whether they would even get off the ground. His inevitable death did not rob him of sleep. He had accepted that the moment he had agreed to Commander Tamai’s request that he lead the most important of the special attack forces, the tokubetsu kogeki tai. No, what concerned him was the prospect that they would be detected and destroyed before they were even airborne.

  He walked around the Type 43 Ohka, running his hand over the smooth metallic surface. It felt cool in the tropical heat. Painted in a disruptive green jungle pattern on top and light blue underneath, it sat in a partially buried hangar under a canopy woven from palm fronds and jungle creepers. Arriving on the atoll by flying boat, he’d been unable to make out any sign of human habitation, let alone a military buildup. And once on the ground he understood why.

  Years of work had gone into preparing this site. Walking around above ground level was strictly prohibited. Tunnels and caverns dug into the ancient, rock-hard coral protected the island’s defenders from prying eyes. There wasn’t even an airstrip in regular use. One had been constructed a year earlier, when the front line was a thousand miles away, but it was now covered by an ingenious system of wheeled garden beds-giant planter boxes on old vehicle chassis in which lay thousands of tons of soil, plants, and even wildlife. Come the day when they were ordered into the skies, the gardens would be pushed down a slightly cambered slope at the edge of the hidden runway. It was a brilliant ruse, and Yukio could only wonder who had come up with it.

  Leaving the deadly aircraft behind him, he walked the length of the hangar to a sunken observation bunker near the water. He mopped at the greasy sheen of sweat on his brow and peered out to sea. The admiral’s seaplane was a faint speck to the north, growing larger as he watched. All of the garrison’s supplies arrived by seaplane or submarine, negating the requirement for an airstrip or any obvious docking facilities. In fact, there was a dock in a large, flooded cave on the far side of island, but it was rarely used.

  Yukio stood in the bunker, shaded by netting thickly threaded with camouflage scrim and vegetation. The two sailors standing beside him trained oversized binoculars on the horizon to either side of the growing dot that was the grand admiral’s plane. There was no control tower to bring them in. No radio contact with the outside world. A fully equipped communications room lay in the jungle about two hundred meters away, but the antennae had never been erected and not a single message had ever been sent or received from the secret base. You had to assume these days that if you spoke on a radio, the enemy would hear you, locate you, and, if they felt like it, destroy you.

  As frustrating as their isolation could be at times, it was a deadly necessity.

  He fancied that he could hear the drone of the seaplane as it dipped through the hot, moist air, its pontoons feeling for the first kiss of the waves. It was still a couple of hundred meters up, but closing rapidly. The angle of approach would take it into a cove on the far side of the soaring headland under which this part of the base had been built. Yukio watched the plane grow larger, its engines sounding louder and louder as it came in. Just before it disappeared from view, cut off by the near-vertical slopes of the heavily forested headland, the pontoons touched down, raising great sails of spray from the green-blue waters of the Pacific.

  The two sailors never once broke the rhythm of their ceaseless metronomic scanning of the horizon. He supposed it made sense, although if American jet planes suddenly appeared it would have to be assumed they’d been discovered, and there would be nothing to be done. Stealth was everything. How many times had that been drummed into him, into everyone on the island?

  Yukio hurried down the flight line. Dozens of Ohkas waited for their first and last flight. Ground crew tinkered and fussed about them like new mothers with a firstborn. In the end, the only way to be sure the planes would work was to use them. They couldn’t really be tested, could they? But day and night, the technicians were here, including a handful of German officers who very much kept to themselves. When he’d arrived and seen them for the first time, he knew that he was involved in something very special. There was a lot of talk of how closely the Reich and the empire were working nowadays, but you still rarely saw a German in this part of the world. Yukio had never been introduced to them, never spoken to them. He didn’t even know what role they played here, other than that they were somehow involved in maintaining the Ohkas.

  They ignored him as he marched past.

  The hangar dipped slightly as he headed inland. At the rear, four wide tunnels led underground, reminding him of the mine shafts in his old hometown of Kitamatsu. He hurried into the opening on the far left. It was about three meters wide, two and a half high. Low-wattage bulbs strung out every six meters provided a minimum of illumination.

  The temperature dropped as he penetrated farther into the island’s foundation. He was probably under fifteen meters of limestone by now. The walls were damp with condensation. He passed other men moving through the network of tunnels. You could always tell the newcomers. They had to stop and check the maps fixed to the walls at every intersection. Yukio had been here three weeks now, and was intimately familiar with all of those areas he was authorized to be in. There weren’t that many places where he might get lost.

  A few turns, a long, almost blacked-out secti
on-three bulbs had blown and not yet been replaced-another turn, and a climb up a spiral staircase carved right into the rock, and he emerged into the reception area. A grand name for a small, buried room in the jungle at the edge of the cove. He saluted the base commander, General Kishi, and his direct superior, Commander Tamai, who were already there. A small launch puttered in toward the shore as the seaplane quickly made ready to leave again, lest its presence be detected.

  Yukio’s heart was nearly bursting with pride as he waited for the grand admiral to arrive. And when he saw that Admiral Onishi, the father of all the tokkotai, was with him, it was nearly too much. He was positively levitating.

  “Careful,” Tamai whispered. “If you stand any straighter, you’ll snap.”

  The two older men chuckled coarsely while the admirals were still out of earshot, but they smartened up when the launch motored in under the overhanging canopy and ran up on the small sandy beach. Yukio was thrilled to see that neither of the visitors stood on ceremony. They alighted from the craft as quickly as possible and hurried deep into the cover of the jungle, their pants and shoes thoroughly soaked by the stagnant water that lay just inside the tree line. They were true fighting men, not just bureaucrats.

  The profuse and elaborate greetings took up some time when Yamamoto and Onishi made it inside the reception area. The pounding in Yukio’s chest was almost painful as Yamamoto stood in front of him, sizing him up.

  “So, Lieutenant,” he said, smiling. “You are to be my divine wind.”

  9

  D-DAY + 21. 24 MAY 1944. 1003 HOURS.

  KO‘OLAU RANGE, HAWAII.

  He kept the cave as clean as possible, which meant having to go farther and farther into the jungle to perform his ablutions. It was a dreadful indignity, being forced to shit in a hole and live like a monkey, but he probably deserved nothing more.

  He had failed the grand admiral. Failed the emperor. Failed his ancestors and the code of bushido.

  Jisaku Hidaka-he could not bring himself to use his military rank anymore-huddled in the shadows of the damp, fetid cave, hugging his knees, shivering with fever, and wondering if it were even possible for him to atone for his miserable faults. Seppuku would not do it. His failure was of so great a magnitude that even the ritual suicide would not attenuate his shame. That was the only reason he had not taken his life.

  At least twice before he had written his death poem, laid out his tanto for the killing stroke, and kneeled on a makeshift tatami-in reality, an old cardboard box. But the temptation to live, the thought that he might strike one more blow against the barbarian hordes, had proved too great. Plus, of course, he had no second, no kaishakunin to observe his sacrifice or perform the daki-kubi, the final cut that would all but decapitate him, with his head left hanging by just a thin strip of flesh.

  No, Hidaka was alone in this cave, alone with his grief.

  He’d fled up here into the Choshiu Range-known as the Ko‘olau to the gaijin-during the chaos of the Americans’ counterattack. He had intended to lead an insurgency that would have rendered the islands useless as a base for the Allies, but he had been cut off, and as far as he could tell all his forces had been destroyed-a good many of them in the first thirty minutes of battle. His personal protection detail, six Tokubetsu Rikusentai marines of the Sasebo Regiment especially trained in bodyguard work, were all gone. Four had died just getting him up here into hiding, when a Wildcat had strafed their jeep. The other two, Corporal Okumi and Sergeant Tsunetomo, had sacrificed themselves in two separate incidents over the last few months, leading search parties away from his hideout.

  So now he was alone in the world.

  Hidden deep within the folds of the central Choshiu, his cave was large, twisting back nearly a hundred meters into the volcanic rock face of the mountains, the entrance protected by a thick canopy of jungle growth. The army had chosen it early in the occupation to serve as a redoubt in the event of a successful American invasion. A large number of fresh mountain streams ran nearby. His daily trek through the soft, boggy undergrowth to fetch water took him through an alien landscape of fat glossy leaves, creeper vines as thick as a man’s torso, and ancient trees that seemed to hunch over as if ready to come alive and crush him with the swing of a great bough. It was all so different from the world he knew, the smell of oil, metal, gunpowder, and the honest stink of fighting men on board His Majesty’s Imperial Japanese Navy ships.

  Hidaka sat near the cave’s entrance, morosely searching the airwaves with his flexipad for a sign that his comrades were still fighting somewhere on the Hawaiian Islands. Every few days he would be “rewarded” with news of a small gun battle or the capture of another “nip holdout.” At least it meant that somebody somewhere was putting up a fight. When his time came he was determined to take at least fifteen or twenty of the white pigs with him. Okumi and Tsunetomo had set up some very clever traps to guard the approaches to the cave, and Hidaka kept a small arsenal behind the solid barricade of black volcanic rocks that they had built up when they first arrived here. Between the razor wire, the spike pits, and the new claymore mines, which were known as “cherry blossoms” to the Japanese, Hidaka was confident that he would give a good account of himself, even though he was a sailor, not a soldier. In the end they were all the emperor’s men, and they bore a sacred duty to carry on the war, no matter how hopeless it might seem. Something, somewhere would turn the tide. The Germans might finish their atomic bomb. The Russians might come out of their coma and attack the West. Yamamoto might yet achieve his strategic masterstroke, the Kassen Kantai.

  As he played with the touch screen of the flexipad, however, running through the civilian radio stations he could pick up, all he heard was music and inane chatter. There was no mention of the great fleet he had observed arriving offshore a few days ago, but that was to be expected. The Americans weren’t entirely incompetent, and they would not want to give away such information, even if the passage of the Clinton and her “battle group” had probably been observed by a dozen Japanese submarines.

  Two days before, Hidaka had crawled and climbed through four valleys to reach a ridgeline high enough to observe the enemy ships. He had made meticulous notes of the enemy’s order of battle, including the presence of the traitor ship, the Siranui, and had returned to his cave ready to send the vital information into the ether with the radio he’d brought up here.

  But as he sat in the cave, surrounded by enough provisions to sustain an entire company for two months, he’d decided that the time was not yet right to make contact. He was only too aware of how easily the gaijin found it to trace rogue electronic signals, and it would be a waste, wouldn’t it, for him to give himself away when there might come some other opportunity to strike at the enemy, or confound his plans.

  On balance, if he had selfishly committed seppuku when the island fell, he wouldn’t have been here to observe the arrival of the enemy fleet. What might he miss now, if he gave himself away at this juncture?

  His observations, and the photographs he’d taken of the task force at anchor around the Clinton, revealed that the Americans had made great strides in the design of their warships and aircraft. He counted at least fifteen destroyers that had obviously been laid down to plans based on ships from the future. They shared the same swept lines and featured strange-looking weapons mounts, possibly rocket launchers. Some of them even had tiny flight decks on which he’d observed helicopters landing and taking off.

  No doubt the imperial navy had advanced many decades in its technology, too. How he wished he could see the first Japanese jet fighters carving into the enemy’s flanks. After all, Japan had built the Zero, the greatest fighter aircraft in the world, and she would certainly have something to match the delta-winged jets he’d photographed on the deck of the Clinton.

  Wouldn’t she?

  D-DAY + 21. 24 MAY 1944. 1024 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON.

  “She’s a beautiful fighting machine,” Admiral Ray Spruance said. �
��The Japs have got nothing to match her.”

  The commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet stood with a large group of officers on the flight deck of the supercarrier, inspecting one of the Clinton’s A-4 Skyhawks. It was only midmorning, but the sun was already high, baking the men and women pink. Kolhammer could feel sweat leaking out under his arms, and he was glad he’d thrown on a pair of sunglasses before stepping out into the glare. Most of his people-nearly three-quarters of them ’temp these days-were hiding behind wraparound shades, but he noted that Spruance and everyone who’d come aboard with him made do with simply squinting into the fierce light.

  He supposed there was some cultural point to be made there, but he was long past worrying about such things. You could spend your whole life cataloging the micro social changes that had occurred since the Transition. Indeed, just as they were leaving San Diego, one pinhead at UCLA had scored a research grant to study the “transplant effect” of unwritten French New Theory by unborn French postmodernists on unwritten texts.

  Lord forgive me for the things I have wrought on this world.

  “Did you have a hard time putting them together?” Spruance asked, jogging him back to reality. “I can’t imagine that you had the blueprints just sitting around somewhere.”

  “No,” Kolhammer answered. “Not exactly. That’d be like you keeping the plans for a Sopwith Camel on board the Enterprise. But we had a lot of relevant technical material, and some corporate memory spread across the Multinational Force, too, including some pretty grizzled old salts who’d actually worked with the Skyhawk early in their careers. Aussies and New Zealanders mostly, but a couple of Lonesome’s aeronautical engineers on the Kandahar. There was one master chief called Madoc, he was like some sort of obsessed fan of the things. And we had a Malaysian crew chief who was on detachment to us. He was a big help. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think.”