Barracuda- Final Bearing

by Michael Dimercurio

  He turned his mind to the things that needed to be done to turn his present ship over to her new skipper, put the car in gear and pulled out, heading for the O-club. It had turned out to be a good day, after all.

  win yokosuka naval base yokosuka, japan Comdr. Toshumi Tanaka gripped the carved wooden handrails mounted on the edge of the clearing situated on the ridge overlooking the submarine piers of the Yokosuka Maritime Self Defense Force Base some 200 meters below the rocky ledge. The clearing at this spot had been groomed as a garden and meditation site. Below Tanaka’s feet rounded stones were placed to form a cobbled area up to the handrails looking down the ledge. The spot was beautiful in the spring and summer, but in the fall the gloomy aura of it made it unpopular, which fitted Tanaka’s mood. He glared out at the vista. Today he could only view the world through a haze of anger and frustration.

  He thought of better times. When he was a small boy he had lived in a house by the sea, a house filled with laughter and love. His father had been a stern but caring naval officer, his mother happy to take care of him and his younger sister Onu. The elder Tanaka, then a junior officer, had been at sea much of the time, but when he was there the family was joyful. Toshumi and Onu spent happy hours playing and reading with their mother, waiting for the times when their father would return. All this until his eighth year when his father Akagi was asked to go on a foreign assignment in the United States and the Tanaka family had left Japan for America.

  Akagi Tanaka, a commander then, was sent to a small seacoast town in Maryland to teach navigation to the students at the U.S. Naval Academy.

  And from then on his son Toshumi learned firsthand what it was to feel like a stranger, to be made fun of and feel humiliation. It had been a relief when he returned to Tokyo and his old friends, but four years after the family’s return the Maritime Self Defense Force called on Akagi Tanaka again, this time to attend the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. By then Toshumi Tanaka was a young teenager, watching the beautiful, rich American girls stroll the beaches and streets of the town, and knowing only rejection. Finally he convinced his family to allow him to go back to Japan and his friends. It was a happy reunion—abruptly interrupted by the news that his mother Orou was dead from breast cancer. From then on Toshumi’s life was a charcoal sketch, done in shades of gray and black. The pain of losing his mother would always be with him and he felt his father responsible. If only his father hadn’t insisted on dragging the family to America, Toshumi reflected bitterly. Two years later his father, now a captain with friends at the Maritime Self Defense Force Academy in Yokosuka, was able to secure an appointment for Toshumi, although Toshumi had begun to hate the navy, connecting it with his father, with the foreign assignments, with his mother’s death. But to say no to this opportunity was to be forever behind his peers, at the bottom of Japanese society. When Toshumi Tanaka finished school he had chosen to go into submarines, finding the surface navy boring, and found a natural, unsuspected talent. Tactically he was far ahead of his contemporaries and drove a submarine like it was part of himself. For the first time in many years he felt happy doing something; when he was driving a sub he could almost forget his mother’s death, his anger at his father. He was promoted years ahead of his contemporaries from lieutenant to lieutenant commander. As one of the youngest lieutenant commanders in the force, he was made the first officer of the first Destiny-class submarine intended for Japanese use—until then they had been manufactured for export sale. This had been the Destiny II class, the first submarine in the class, named Eternal Spirit. After two years in the building yards and three years at sea Toshumi was promoted to full commander and given command of his own new Destiny II ship, the Winged Serpent. That had been only a year ago, and now he was a senior officer and submarine commander at age thirty-five. His father, Akagi, was now an admiral, the chief of staff of the MSDF, and though some outsiders thought that Toshumi’s position was based on his father’s commanding the force, those who knew Toshumi Tanaka also knew of his extraordinary talents for commanding men and his ship. Tanaka forced his thoughts back to the present, forced his eyes to see the naval base stretching out to the horizon on either side. Below the ridge, piers pointed out to the bay, fingers reaching seaward. There was a large gap between the closest piers, with a squat outbuilding located half on the concrete of the pier, half hanging out over the brackish water of the slip. Tied up to the bollards on the seawall was a submarine, one of the Destiny I’ll-class ships, the computer-controlled unmanned vessels. Abruptly he heard footsteps behind him, and a shadow of a man materialized beside him. Tanaka did not turn. “I thought I might find you here. Captain,” a young voice said. Still Tanaka didn’t turn. His second-in-command, Lt.

  Comdr. Hiro Mazdai, was as different from himself as a first officer could be. Tanaka was the son of a navy officer, Mazdai was born to wealth, the son of a Panasonic chief financial officer and board member.

  Tanaka was raised on military compounds, Mazdai had never left Tokyo until he went to sea. Tanaka had sweated through five grueling years at the Self Defense Force Maritime Academy, Mazdai had breezed through Tokyo University. Tanaka was a loner, Mazdai was married to a beautiful Tokyo girl eleven years his junior. Tanaka was just short of 170 centimeters tall, almost towering for a Japanese, but slight, almost frail. Mazdai was short, stretching to reach 155 centimeters, solid and wide. “The crew is ready, sir,” Mazdai said. “We have completed the ready-for-sea checklist. All the weapons have passed their electronic checks.” Far out on the right, blue in the mist, their submarine, the Winged Serpent, lay tied up next to several other submarines of the Destiny II class. Down below, an odd-looking truck drove up. Several men in yellow suits jumped off the rear. All wore full helmets with clear faceplates and carried automatic rifles. A door in the pier building rose slowly, revealing bright interior lights shining down on the weapon-loading gear. “We won’t be going to sea,” Tanaka said flatly to his second in command. “Sir?” Tanaka looked directly at Mazdai, disgust clear in his face. “That Three-class down there, that robot sub is doing our mission. Our weapons will be removed as soon as that… thing is done being loaded.”

  “They took the mission away from us?” The men in yellow suits surrounded the truck as it opened, splitting like a clamshell to reveal encased weapons painted yellow and magenta.

  Stencilled on the side of the capsules were large words, unreadable from that height, but Tanaka knew what they spelled: “danger— RADIATION HAZARD—PLUTONIUM.”

  “Some wizard at fleet headquarters has decided that an unmanned submarine is more appropriate in the land-attack role than our Winged Serpent.” Mazdai paused, weighing his words. “Sir, you are telling me that Winged Serpent has been taken off the strike mission. We have lost it to a damned robot? And someone at fleet HQ downloaded our mission to one of the Three class.”

  “That, Mr. First, is correct.”

  “Do you think your father had anything to do with this?”

  “Whatever, I doubt our orders will change.”

  “What are our orders now?”

  “We pull into the loading bay and give back the Hiroshima missiles, then we go back to Pier 17.”

  Two hydraulic cranes had pulled up to the open clamshell truck beds. The men in yellow suits fastened lifting slings to either end of the first weapon. Behind the truck a flatbed weapon transporter waited, ready to move into the weapon-loading building. Tanaka noticed that the yellow-suited men’s full-face helmets were connected to air bottles on their backs, precautions in case of a plutonium loss of containment.

  “The Three class is flawed, sir. How can they trust it with a land strike?”

  Tanaka shook his head. “I agree, but if the robot submarines prove themselves in a combat situation, the Two class will be phased out. They will claim manned submarines devote too much volume and weight to hotel accommodations.

  The computer-driven subs have no living quarters so they can carry more weapons. Command and control is su
pposedly more assured.”

  “Until, sir, the computer has a malfunction. And a computer-driven ship can only fight the way it’s programmed.

  No midbattle learning, no human ingenuity, no intuition.”

  “And no wives at home to worry about, no babies about to be born, no monthly bills distracting the crews’ minds.

  The computer never gets tired, it never longs for a woman, it never gets sick. It’s just always there, driving the submarine. So goes the opinion of fleet HQ.”

  As they spoke, the cranes lifted out the first weapon canister and loaded it gingerly to the waiting transport bed, then turned their booms to pick up the second unit.

  “You once mentioned inviting your father on the ship, sir, perhaps for dinner? Maybe together we could convince him.”

  Tanaka controlled his face to hide thoughts about his father. “Perhaps we will do that soon, but there is no time now.”

  The cranes lowered the second weapon to the transport bed. The clamshell truck closed and drove off, the cranes also departing. The men in yellow suits stayed behind, walking slowly behind the low transport, which rolled into the loading building and vanished into the portal. The rolling door came down, leaving the seawall area deserted except for two guards with their rifles at the ready.

  “You’d better get back to the ship and inform the men about scrubbing the mission,” Tanaka told Mazdai, who was astute enough to know when to withdraw and leave Tanaka alone.

  All was quiet now on the seawall. Tanaka could visualize the Three-class submarine being nose-loaded with weapons. The loading building functioned as a caisson, sealing around the bow of the sub and draining out the water to leave the entire nose-cone area accessible for bow-in torpedo loading. Except the weapons being loaded into the unmanned computer submarine were not torpedoes, but Hiroshima missiles. For the land-attack mission that his Winged Serpent should have had.

  After a sleepless night, part of it spent in the rain at his mother’s memorial, he showered, dressed in a fresh uniform and called for his driver. Within hours he was back at the pier. Before he walked down its length, he stopped and stared at the scenario unfolding under the harsh lamps of the floodlights in the middle of the night.

  Moored to the neighboring pier was the Three-class ship that had been loaded with the radioactive missiles the day before. The ship that was formerly called Divine Firmament had been renamed Curtain of Flames—presumably to inspire fear. In Tanaka it only inspired rage.

  tokyo, japan kasumigaseki district japanese defense agency headquarters The black Lexus limousine rolled to a halt before the headquarters building, its powerful engine purring quietly at idle. Immediately a uniformed guard in a shining helmet with white gloves opened the rear door and snapped to attention in a rigid salute. A dozen other military guards holding rifles stood lined up on either side of a heavy gate set into the stone wall surrounding the building. Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita stepped out of the large car, past the guards, and through the gate, never acknowledging their existence. A step behind him Asagumo MacHiie, the Minister of Information, walked and tried to keep up with Kurita. The prime minister was twenty years MacHiie’s senior, but seemed to have the physical strength of a man ten years younger than MacHiie. Both men were dressed in expensive and conservative dark charcoal gray suits, starched white handmade shirts, and crimson ties, each with a tiny intricately detailed Japanese flag set in the red field. Their leather shoes were Japanese made, each pair worth the equivalent of a month’s rent for a luxury Tokyo flat.

  Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita was nearing sixty years old but had a tangible vitality to him. He could energize a room. His hair was mostly gray with only hints of its former black. Kurita was the grandson of the Imperial Japanese Army general who had commanded the invasion and occupation force in Indonesia. Kurita’s father, Noboru Kurita, had worked for MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, during the heady years of Japan’s rise from the ashes of World War II to world preeminence in manufacturing and trade. The elder Kurita had become a deputy minister for semiconductors and was responsible for the successful Japanese penetration of American electronics markets. He was the architect of the Japanese takeover attempt of AT&T, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and General Motors. Noboru had died of a stroke at his desk, laboring over the acquisition deal that should have made IBM a Japanese-owned company.

  Hosaka Kurita had mourned Noboru’s passing, his bond with his father so strong that even now, nearly fifteen years later, he would occasionally mention to Asagumo MacHiie, his minister of information, that he could still feel the spirit of his father with him, struggling by his side, watching over him, demanding performance from him.

  Fortunately for Noboru Kurita, he had not lived to see the trade war with the US and Europe, and the eventual closing of Western markets to Japan. Kurita would never forget the day the US president had signed the Fair Trade Bill into law that made anything with Japanese content* over 10 percent illegal to be imported or sold in the US and made Japanese ownership of corporations illegal, even repatriating—or expropriating—all real estate sold to Japanese owners. The nations of the European Union passed similar laws, some even harsher than America’s. That month Japan turned into a poor nation, the cash river from the West drying up. That had all been four hard years ago, two years before Hosaka Kurita came to power.

  Hosaka Kurita had followed his father’s footsteps at MITI and had eventually himself been elevated to Minister of International Trade and Industry, perhaps because of his father’s reputation there. But Hosaka Kurita proved able, becoming a member of the Diet’s House of Councillors at the age of forty-six. When he was fifty-five, he became prime minister. In Kurita’s mind his ascent to PM was not so much a result of his personal qualities as of his outspoken, passionate speeches against the West and the United States in particular. Even so, his character and leadership were already legendary at MITI, his eloquence able to move the entire Diet when he was a member of that legislative body. His platform, his mandate and, he believed, his destiny was to bring Japan back to world prominence, as his father had done in the 1950s. Except that now Japan’s kokutai, her national destiny, depended not on forsaking the sword for the factory but rather upon using the might of the factory to once more hoist the sword.

  But as passionate and warlike as Kurita was, he was also conditioned in the ways of on, the special obligation of one holding power to those whom his power touches.

  He had listened countless hours to his father’s words on giri, the network of obligational relationships, the endless mutual and reciprocal obligations borne by a leader. Kurita was at once assertive and certain yet humble and nonconfrontational. Kurita could give a speech urging confrontation with the West, and afterward seem to back down to the conflicting opinion of a colleague. Kurita was Japan. There was no Caesar in Japan, no pope, no king. Power was shared. Groups, not leaders, did the business of governing Japan. But ultimately those groups would listen to someone with the voice of destiny, and destiny seemed to sing through Kurita’s throat. They were only a dozen steps into the building when it opened into a vast rotunda, the dome peak over seven stories overhead. There Koutarou lizuka, the Director General of the Japanese Defense Agency, waited with his entourage and the other council members. Prime Minister Kurita first greeted lizuka as a father greeted a son. He beamed up at the younger man, his bow deep. lizuka turned to MacHiie, a warm bow of greeting passing between the men. lizuka had also been to the university with MacHiie years before. In fact, so had every other member of Kurita’s Defense Security Council.

  The DSC met at the headquarters of the Japanese Defense Agency at any point of crisis that could result in military action. Kurita had formed the DSC soon after being voted PM, and the council was made up of the five inner-circle cabinet ministers whom Kurita most trusted. The men were arranged by rank, determined by how close they were to Kurita. The PM and lizuka greeted each of the other council members—Foreign Minister Yoshida, the stereotypical
diplomat; MITI Minister Uchida, a hardheaded hawk; and Minister of Finance Sugimoto, the elderly, dispassionate financial wizard recently brought over from industry, from Sanyo. At the end of the row, a newcomer waited, an elderly man with what looked like great physical strength, white hair, white mustache and a starched white high-collared tunic with gold-braided shoulder boards, ribbons on his breast, a gold rope slung over his shoulder. His pants were starched and white, his shoes white as well. At the man’s hip was a sword hanging off a gold hook that vanished into the tunic. The man’s face was creased with deep wrinkles, the tanned skin taut. Rather than the usual Japanese dark brown, this man’s eyes were light gray with flecks of green running radially from the irises. Some said he looked like a wolf. “Admiral Tanaka,” Kurita intoned as the men bowed to each other, “I am so glad that you were able to attend. Gentlemen, Adm. Akagi Tanaka, Supreme Commander of the Maritime Self Defense Force, will attend this meeting in addition to General Gotoh.” Standing a few meters from Tanaka was Gen. Masao Gotoh, the Chairman of the Self Defense Force Joint Staff Council, who functioned as the commander in chief of the entire military. Gotoh stood a distance from Admiral Tanaka, as if he wished to express a tacit disapproval of his own subordinate—remarkable within the tight framework of team cooperation inside the military. The men walked into an ornate room with a huge rare tigerwood table taken from Indonesia in the last world war. On the wall were oil paintings of Japanese military conquests from the previous millennia all the way to the fighting for the empire in World War II. Shields and swords hung at the corners, while glass cases enclosed antique ship models, the battleship Yamato over four meters from bow to stern, its guns pointed at the conference table as if leveling fingers demanding action from the council. The room seemed to be designed for war plans. The prime minister used notes, since in the ancient tradition of matomari, the honored vehicle of group decision-making, the leader was first obligated to summarize an issue, showing no opinion, so that the group could begin to discuss it. Since confrontation was unheard of, each man would reveal his opinion slowly, one thought at a time. The momentum of consensus would build slowly, the brakes of dissenting opinions applied gently. As the men began to see similar patterns of thought among their colleagues, their opinions would become more safe to expose, until finally consensus would be reached. Once the leader established agreement, action would be taken. Kurita stood and cleared his throat, his hands at rest at his sides. The ministers and military officers sat straight in their chairs, all eyes on Kurita. The hum of the presentation screen coming down was barely perceptible, accentuating the pin-drop silence in the room. “Good morning, gentlemen,” Kurita began as a map of Japan flashed on the screen. The Homeland was colored white. To the northwest Greater Manchuria was displayed in gray. “I hardly need mention the gravity of the Greater Manchurian situation. In the last twelve hours we have determined that here in Tamga”—a small dot in a valley near Lake Ozero Chanka pulsed in red— “is a storage depot for SS-34 missiles. General Gotoh will run the disk of our confirming penetration mission.” The disk played the scenes obtained from Major Na-muru’s mission into Tamga, up to the point where he said, “To the victory of Japan,” when the picture was darkened. The soundtrack, however, continued, the dual explosions loud in the enhanced acoustics of the room. The screen retracted into the ceiling. Kurita cleared his throat again. “It is clear that the SS-34 missiles are nuclear tipped. It is also clear that they are twenty-four minutes’ flight time away from us in Tokyo.” Kurita looked around the room. “Minister Yoshida, do you have any thoughts?” Yoshida, as foreign minister, was notorious for his relatively optimistic view of the world. “It is most regrettable that there appear to be offensive instruments of war in Greater Manchuria. However, it is our responsibility to the people of Japan to remember that these weapons may not be aimed at Japan at all. They may not even work. The Russians no doubt left them behind. They are not even loaded into those underground silos. It would be premature, I suggest, to assume the intention of aggression only on this.” Kurita thanked him, turned to General Gotoh.