War of the Sun

by Maloney, Mack;

  But what was its purpose? Were these people allied with, or fighting against the Cult? His superior, Lieutenant Karbochev, had filed a report several days before, indicating he’d seen a jumpjet during his last reconnoiter of the Great Wall, and had witnessed its pilot being “captured” by some locals.

  Obviously, Kartoonov was now watching a replay of that incident. Except this time, it appeared as if the pilot and the people on the ground were working together.

  Using his rifle scope on simple magnification, Kartoonov was able to zoom in on the jumpjet’s canopy just as it popped open. The pilot quickly unstrapped himself, crawled out of the cockpit, and jumped to the ground, where he was met by handshakes from the six men, who were attired in extremely well-tailored black camouflage uniforms.

  The group of seven men then began a very intense discussion. The men in black were gesturing wildly, their orgy of finger-pointing seemingly indicating things far off in the highlands. The pilot, on the other hand, was pointing to various gadgets under his airplane’s wing, and then every once in a while, to something far out at sea. Despite all the animation, though, Kartoonov didn’t have the faintest idea what the mysterious figures were talking about.

  So, like any good intelligence agent, he took out a pencil and some paper and began to take notes. He indicated the time, weather, and amount of covering at his location. He described as best he could each of the seven individuals, who were now sitting on the ground and exchanging what looked like photographs. He even made a rough drawing of the jumpjet.

  About ten minutes into the discussion, one of the men in the black uniforms retrieved a knapsack from the high grass nearby. After working over this sack for a minute or so, he placed it at the far end of the landing area and then rejoined the main group. A few seconds later the knapsack exploded in a great ball of flame. Yet there was no noise. Kartoonov was at first startled and then completely bewildered.

  What was this? he wondered. How can there be such an explosion with no noise?

  He’d seen enough. He quietly but hastily packed his gear and slipped deeper into the dense overgrowth. There was now a change in plans. He would not be going down to the Great Wall this trip. Instead, he would begin the long journey back to his faraway base immediately.

  He had to tell his officers what he’d just seen.

  Thirty-three

  Okinawa, one hour before dawn

  NOT MANY OF THE 20,000 Cult soldiers manning the Great Wall saw the RPV fly over. And those who did weren’t sure exactly what it was.

  Barely six feet long, with a thin wing and a whining propeller, the RPV looked and sounded like nothing more than an elaborate model airplane, a child’s hobby toy.

  But the RPV was not a toy. For many of the Cult soldiers who saw it, it was nothing less than the remotely-controlled eyes of their own impending deaths, staring down at them.

  The RPV (for Remote-Control Vehicle) was a robot version of an old-fashioned spotter plane, and the crew of the New Jersey had been using it for years. Launched from one of the battleship’s scout boats and remotely controlled by its crew, the RPV contained video cameras that could send back live pictures of enemy positions. The gunners on the huge battleship would view the broadcast and divine from it such critical things as target size, location, precise range, even weather factors—everything needed for the most accurate and therefore most deadly shot.

  The New Jersey had nine big guns in all, arranged in three turrets of three each. The guns were massive—16-inch cannons capable of firing an explosive-packed projectile the weight of an old Volkswagen Beetle a distance of twenty-four miles. Whatever this warhead hit was usually vaporized, leaving behind a crater sometimes several hundred feet across. If all nine of the battlewagon’s guns fired at once—which could be done, even though the recoil was almost enough to actually move the dreadnought sideways—the post-barrage landscape of the target area would look like it had been hit by a small nuclear bomb.

  Combining the eyes of the RPV with the massive firepower of the 16-inch guns created a weapons system that could near-perfectly deliver, and in a rather cold and calculating way, a frightening amount of death and destruction.

  Yet, it was all in a day’s work for the crew of the New Jersey.

  The battleship was cruising due north, eighteen miles east of Okinawa. It had been on this station all night, launching and retrieving the RPV three times in an effort to gather as much battlefield intelligence as possible. What the RPV’s cameras showed the gun crews was that the ribbons of weapons ringing the island were as frighteningly interconnected as Hunter’s high-altitude recon had indicated.

  But the video also told them something else: that though the guns were manned and ready, there was no special activity going on—no ammo cars rushing about, no double-manning of the myriad of gun positions.

  In other words, the Cult had no idea what was coming.

  It was exactly four A.M. when the New Jersey’s gun crews got the order to fire.

  Coming in from over the horizon, each shell found its mark on a bunker, a pillbox, or a fortified cave that made up some part of the Great Wall of interconnecting shore defenses. Cruising back and forth, and firing three times a minute for nearly an hour, the New Jersey and its great guns raked the Okinawan coastline, turning sections of the Great Wall’s concrete, steel, and stone redoubts into desolate moonscapes filled with craters twenty feet deep. Many of the smoking holes were filled with bodies, most of them twisted and burned in the most horrible fashion. Though extremely valuable from a tactical point of view, the poststrike RPV footage was not easy to watch, simply because whenever the New Jersey went into action, the overall result usually resembled a slaughter, as opposed to a battle. It was death at its most methodical.

  Watching the massive show of destruction through high-powered NightScope binoculars from the bridge of the USS Fitzgerald was Ben Wa.

  Men will go mad from the concussion alone, he thought, staring in awe as the huge naval shells roared almost right over the carrier and impacted up and down the island’s coastline. And madness can be worse than death.

  He checked the time; it was close to 0500. He’d been watching the bombardment for nearly an hour now. He checked his position: the Fitz was now just three miles off the east coast of Okinawa, cruising very slowly toward the south, and exactly where it was supposed to be. He crossed his fingers. So far, everything was going as planned.

  At exactly 0505, three luminous shells streaked over the carrier and slammed onto the very peak of Shuri Mountain. This was the signal from Wolf. The New Jersey’s pre-invasion barrage was over, and with it, phase one of the plan.

  It was now time for phase two to begin.

  Ben turned his binoculars toward the Tennyson and the Cohen, both cruising on a course parallel to that of the Fitz.

  He could see troops of the CLF—the Combined Landing Force—waiting along the gangways of the Tennyson. The small force was made up of the JAWs team, the 104th Combat Engineers, and fifty additional troopers culled from the crews of the four ships of the Task Force. On the sounds of a single pipe whistle, these men went scrambling over the side of the Tennyson, down the newly-woven webbed nets, and into the New Jersey’s fast patrol boats that were tethered alongside. As each one became full, the pilots kicked in the motors and turned them toward the beach.

  All boats were away by 0515.

  Hunter had launched in the F-16XL shortly after the CLF boats began heading for the beach.

  Climbing to 20,000 feet, he was able to take in the entire Okinawa operations area, an ideal situation prior to commencement of action.

  As he put the F-16 into a long, looping elliptical orbit over the smoky island, he played over and over in his mind the elements of the invasion plan.

  There was always a major risk involved in any military operation—combat was, in the end, about little more than killing or being killed. Good planning meant that everything had been done to keep your casualties at a minimum while inflictin
g maximum casualties on your opponent, all while trying to achieve an objective. Good planning then involved the proper juggling of the known factors.

  But Hunter knew there were some things that could not be planned for. There were always the unknown factors—the monsters out there waiting to bite back. A soldier’s most dangerous enemy many times was the host of intangibles of combat.

  These Jokers in the deck always made their appearance, usually at the most critical junction of the operation. Some commanders thought the trick was to deal with them when they arose, but this was faulty thinking. Hunter strived to at least identify them before they struck.

  The most probable Jokers in this deck were the Zeros in the vast formation he’d encountered while rescuing the Seagull seaplane. There were at least a thousand of them at the time, and they had to be somewhere.

  The question was, where?

  Hunter doubted the Zeros flew in and out of Shuri Mountain on a regular basis. Their sheer numbers, and the resulting air traffic control needed to handle them, was nowhere in evidence on Okinawa. However, the immediate area around the smog-filled island was dotted with smaller islands, many dozens of which could support airstrips. A real nightmare would be if there were dozens of Cult airstrips spread out on these nearby islands, or even back on the big Home Islands themselves. Destroying so many bases would be next to impossible for the limited resources of the Task Force.

  But Hunter was not worried about this multiple-bases scenario. He didn’t think this was the case at all, and for a simple reason: it was just not in the style of the Cult to build a whole bunch of little bases. They did things big—big invasion army, big airplane factory, big shipyard. That’s why Hunter believed that there was one big airstrip somewhere, probably close by, probably little more than a single runway, some fuel tanks—and a parking area for a thousand airplanes. A very temporary haven for recently-built Zeros before they were deployed to God-knows-where.

  Common sense also told him that these airplanes had to be found. Doing so would prove to be the most dangerous, and, in the end, the most fatal part of the Okinawa Operation.

  It was 0525.

  Hunter turned back over the southern tip of Okinawa and headed northeast again.

  In the past five minutes his radio had come alive with static and voices crackling all over the UHF band. Calls between the ships of the Task Force added up to about a quarter of this cacophony, calls between the ships and the landing parties probably added another 25 percent. The rest of the calls were fake—recordings made prior to the operation’s jumpoff and presently being piped onto the frequency via a long-playing tape recorder onboard the Tennyson. (The entire VHF band was filled with fake messages.) It was a simple yet effective psy-ops plan. The idea was to make the Cultists think the American strike force was larger than just four ships.

  False radio was just one of the many deceptions that Hunter had factored into the overall plan. Unlike many military men, he believed absolutely in the value of psychological operations, especially in such an uneven engagement. Good planning was necessary, of course, but when the bullets really started flying, plans sometimes went awry. Confusion resulted—in fact, more often than not, confusion was the overriding factor in combat, for both sides. When this happened, it was usually the least confused of the two opponents who prevailed.

  There was a difference between confusion and surprise. Surprise was especially helpful for the attacking force, more so if the defenders were completely unaware of what was about to hit them, as was the case for the United Americans in attacking Okinawa. Indeed, all indications were that the Cult didn’t know they were coming, a big plus in favor of the Task Force.

  But the element of surprise was only a temporary phenomenon. Eventually, the Cult would figure out what was going on, and then they would activate their own defense plans, probably fairly quickly.

  This is where confusion came in—it was like prolonging the surprise. And the art of spreading confusion was, in fact, found in the science of psy-ops. Filling the airwaves with faked calls was just one part of the plan.

  In the midst of the organized confusion on the radio, Hunter was able to key in on one of the legitimate frequencies.

  “TF-One reports go-code Green,” he heard someone say. “That’s Green at Two-Delta-Seven.”

  He took a deep breath from his oxygen mask—it was the signal he’d been waiting for.

  Putting the F-16XL into a steep bank, he rocketed down to just 2500 feet. The boats of the CLF were now just 500 yards off the beachhead—some very critical moments were coming up. Would the landing go off as they had planned?

  He got his answer just an instant later.

  With the roar so loud he could hear it 2500 feet above him, a large section of the Cult’s great wall of weapons opened up all at once. Suddenly there were explosions going off everywhere. The early morning sky was awash in tracer fire. The perpetual smog bank on the eastern side of the island was suddenly lit up with flames and rocket contrails, so many guns were firing at once.

  Hunter banked to the right, getting a better view of the landing parties. They were just reaching the beach now, the fast New Jersey patrol boats skimming in, seemingly right on top of the waves. By the time the first CLF troopers came clamoring out of the boats and into the shallow water, there were hundreds of explosions going on all around and above them. As they scrambled up onto the beach, the enemy fire all around them was escalating by frightening proportions. From this altitude, it appeared as if the CLF soldiers were walking in Hell itself, a fiery trap from which no one could escape.

  Yet Hunter tapped the flag in his pocket and whistled with great relief.

  So far, so good, he thought.

  The CLF troopers hit the beach at 0530.

  Above them on either side, in fact, all around them, enemy shells were exploding, mortars were going off, and tracer fire was as thick as the smoke. The combined firepower of the Cult’s interlocking guns a half mile inland made for a very noisy, spectacular display.

  Yet not one man among the CLF had been killed or wounded in the landing—in fact, not a one suffered so much as a scratch. Despite the awesome enemy fire, the hundred or so soldiers were protected, unhittable. Invulnerable. They had moved off the scout boats and up onto the beach in a hasty but orderly fashion, making sure that all of their valuable equipment was accounted for and carried ashore. Now they were flooding into the jungle itself, leaving the maelstrom of enemy fire to batter away at empty stretches of beach.

  The first critical minutes of the small invasion had been painless for one reason: Hunter had found the G-spot.

  No one was really sure who had come up with that name, but in the end, it did become rather appropriate. Sweet Spot would have done nicely, too, for what Hunter had found was the one section of Okinawa’s beach where the massive combined firepower of the Great Wall did not interlock. Finding this magic piece of real estate had been the whole purpose of his high-altitude scan with the Juice Machine; indeed, it was the cornerstone of the whole invasion plan.

  As it turned out, finding the G-spot had actually been fairly easy. A close examination of the Juice Machine’s power-surge scan footage revealed a handful of areas on the island’s coastline where gun placement on the Great Wall was low. This was not unexpected—no matter how in-depth the defense, few commanders have the luxury of spreading all guns evenly throughout an entire line. The rugged, constantly-changing terrain of Okinawa made this especially true.

  The trick was to find the softest of the soft spots, and then further define it down to a narrow corridor of complete safety, that is, the place where not one of the enemy’s thousands of interlocking guns could reach.

  (It didn’t take a military tactics expert to figure out that such a corridor of complete safety could exist. Common sense said that the deeper an enemy’s defense the less likely there would be any holes. However, by the same reasoning, if there was a hole, then it might be absolutely safe to move through it, simply becau
se you were reasonably certain the enemy didn’t know about it. If he had, he would have smothered it long ago.)

  Hunter found the G-spot just south of a place called Nin. It was a small nub of land which formed the top of a tiny bay about mid-point on the eastern end of the island. The beach here was very narrow; there was not even twenty-five yards of loose sand before the jungle began. The section of the Great Wall which ran just a half mile inland was not exactly thick with guns; the terrain was dense jungle, pocketed with deep volcanic crevices, and many high protecting cliffs—the natural defenses used by the Japanese Imperial Army during the last bloody battle of 1945. Through a series of triangulations, Hunter had determined that one 200-foot wide section of the beach at Nin was just beyond the range of most of the nearby guns and just under the range of the others. And because of the reverse curving nature of the beach, the northern side was protected by cliffs from long-range guns to the south, and the southern side was protected by the same cliffs from the long-range guns in the north.

  This was the G-spot.

  For added insurance, the barrage by the New Jersey had subtly concentrated on the immediate area around Nin. Careful not to reveal the landing spot, the New Jersey’s gun crews had spread out their fire as the battleship moved back and forth off the coast for one hellish hour. However, anytime Nin was within range, they fired an extra barrage per gun before continuing on their way.

  So the CLF landing had been a noisy but casualty-free cakewalk. Once the troops moved into the jungle, the only sign they found of the enemy were scattered fragments of clothing and bone, the few discernible leftovers of the New Jersey’s bombardments in the area.

  They headed inland, through the lush tropical jungle, moving quickly in single file until they were well to the rear of the wall of enemy guns. When they reached a small river called the Si, the force began splitting up. The JAWs teams, under command of Captain Cook, took the fifty extra Task Force troopers and crossed the shallow river. They were heading to a point one mile west, where they would divide once more and then move toward their assigned targets.