Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  Instead he was creeping north at the head of a much-reduced Combined Fleet, a force about a third of its original size, to spend himself in a desperate lunge against the emperor’s newest enemies, the godless hordes of Joseph Stalin. He wished he’d never heard of Kolhammer or the Emergence. It would have been better to perish as he was meant to, shot down in 1943. Even defeat and occupation as they had originally played out would have been preferable to enslavement under the Russians, as now seemed to be the fate of Nippon.

  He was aware of the grim mood on the bridge of the battleship. There was none of the elation or anticipation of victory he remembered from Midway or Hawaii. How could there be, when he had such limited resources with which to gamble? He had only three carriers under his command, and one of them, the Nagano, was a converted cruiser with nothing but tokkotai aboard. Once they were launched, she would revert to a simple support role, her offensive capacity entirely used up.

  He caught himself shaking his head. There would be no Kassen Kantai with the U.S. Navy, no last great decisive battle. His life and the lives of his men would be spent in a hopeless, unplanned stand against an enemy of whom they knew little, other than the fact that he enjoyed a vast superiority in men and matériel.

  Yamamoto flexed his injured left hand, which ached with phantom pain. He had lost two fingers fighting against this same adversary almost four decades earlier, at the Battle of Tsushima. That engagement had been a stunning victory over an old, corrupt European regime.

  It had heralded a new world.

  He feared that this next battle against the Russians would do exactly the same, but with infinitely darker consequences for his countrymen.

  D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0232 HOURS.

  HMAS HAVOC, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  “Captain? You’d best come see this.”

  Jane Willet tried to blink the crust of sleep from her eyes, but it was too thick, forcing her to rub away the residue that had accumulated in just a few hours. Not surprising really. She’d been so tired when she turned in that her eyes had been stinging and watery even as she lay her head on the pillow. And stim supplements were just a happy memory.

  “S’up,” she croaked at her intelligence boss, Lieutenant Lohrey. “Trouble?”

  “As usual.”

  Willet hadn’t changed for bed. She’d known she was only ever going to get her head down for a short time, anyway. Shrugging her gray coveralls back on over her shoulders, she accepted a cup of tea from Lohrey.

  “Cheers,” she said as she sipped at the steaming mug. “So don’t let me die wondering, Amanda.”

  “Looks like the Marianas gig is off,” Lohrey said. “We’ve got a major Japanese force at the edge of the threat bubble, heading toward the Sovs at full clip.”

  That got her attention.

  Everyone had been wondering what the Japanese would do, faced with a two-front attack. There’d been little evidence of any ground units being moved from the Marianas, but until now the question of the imperial fleet had remained open. Willet sucked down a mouthful of the painfully hot black tea. It completed the job of waking her up.

  “Okay. Bring me up to speed.”

  The two women squeezed out of her cabin, heading for the Combat Center a short distance away as Lohrey filled her in on the latest.

  “All organized resistance on Kunashir and Shikotan appears to be finished. We’re picking up evidence of isolated small-unit clashes there, but nothing of greater significance. Red Army engineers have already begun extending airstrips and repairing the port facilities at Yuzhno-Kurilsk.

  “The Hokkaido landings are a bloody mess, but the Japanese just don’t have the forces in depth to hold out. The mass kamikaze raids are really fucking with the Sovs, though, focusing on their landing ships, which are banged up pretty badly. Admiral Yumashev is gonna have some explaining to do.”

  They entered the sub’s control center and Willet nodded to her executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Grey. A quick glance at a nav screen told her they hadn’t moved from their new station, thirty miles to the southwest of Kunashir, the southernmost island in the Kuril chain. The Sea of Okhotsk had grown too crowded for comfort, and Willet had ordered the boat back out into the northern Pacific. Now, it seemed, they were lying directly in the path of what was left of Yamamoto’s fleet.

  “I hear we have company,” she said to her XO. Having removed themselves from right under the keels of the Soviet armada, it was no longer necessary to maintain silent running. In fact, they probably hadn’t really needed to earlier, but Willet had insisted anyway. Better safe than sorry.

  Conrad Grey nodded. “We’ve got a Big Eye moving south to cover them, ma’am. No visual yet, but the bird’s arrays have locked on and they’re showing a task force of forty-nine ships, including at least eleven major surface combatants. We’re also picking up indications of some comparatively advanced radar equipment, probably of German origin. The new Siemens sets, if I had to take a punt.”

  Willet handed the empty mug to a sailor as she reached the battlespace display at the center of her bridge. Three of the sub’s four drones were airborne and feeding data back to the Havoc. At a safe remove from the hostilities, she was able to lurk just beneath the surface to take the signals live. One large screen ran a vision of the Soviet fleet in the waters off Hokkaido—the northernmost of Japan’s main islands—and the southern Kurils. Another featured low-light-amplified pictures of the ground fighting on Hokkaido. But it was a third that claimed her attention, a flatscreen full of computer-generated imagery, representing the approach of Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet.

  “How long before we get a visual?”

  “Twenty minutes, max,” Grey responded. “That Big Eye is running down. We can’t move her much farther south or we won’t get her back.”

  “Okay,” said Willet. “Here’s a Pepsi Challenge. Do we sink them or not?”

  Lieutenant Lohrey remained poker-faced.

  Her XO smiled mischievously. “That’s why you make the big bucks, Captain. Those calls are way beyond my pay grade.”

  “Amanda?”

  The intelligence boss shrugged. “You really want my opinion, Captain—let ’em at each other. I think we all know where this bullshit with the Sovs is leading. Yamamoto kills a bunch of these clowns now, just means we won’t have to fight them a few weeks down the road.”

  “You’re such a cynic, Amanda.”

  “Generational ennui, ma’am. Comes from cleaning up after the boomers and those lazy Gen-X fuckers.”

  “Don’t look at me like that, Lieutenant. They ran out of letters for my generation. And for what it’s worth, I think you’re right.

  “So here’s my plan. We’re going to sit on our arses and do precisely nothing, Generation-X-style. We’ll just watch this movie nice and quietly. We’ll rip and burn all the data we can get. And in the unlikely event that any of the Japanese survive and turn around to head for Kolhammer and Spruance, then we’ll kick the shitter out of them. Concur?”

  “Sounds groovy,” Lohrey said.

  “XO?”

  “As I said, skipper, that’s why you get the big bucks.”

  “Actually, it’s pounds nowadays. And not that many of them. All-righty, then, let’s get ready. Prep the last drone. I want full-spectrum coverage of this toga party.”

  D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0342 HOURS.

  HIJMS YAMATO, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  “The tokkotai are ready, Admiral. They await your orders.”

  Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto stood at the blast windows, hands clasped behind his back, as immovable as Mount Fuji. He could see the outline of the Nagano against the faintest hint of approaching dawn. She stood out from the other two surviving flattops because of the radical tilt of her flight deck, designed to fling the Type 44 Ohkas up into the sky at a twenty-degree angle. The piloted rocket bombs were a marvelous engineering feat, yet also an indictment of the Japanese science and industry and, beyond that, of Japanese soci
ety. While this iteration of the original powered rocket bomb was a vast improvement on the primitive efforts mustered by the navy at the end of the original war, it was still a crude attempt to compete with much more advanced technologies now pouring out of factories in America.

  He sighed quietly.

  No American fliers would be asked to turn themselves into living warheads. Their country was already producing missiles that relied on inanimate circuitry to guide them to their targets. Nothing as wondrous as the rockets and death rays—lasers, he corrected himself—that had arrived with Kolhammer. But still a great leap beyond what he had to call upon.

  “Admiral?”

  Yamamoto half turned toward the timid voice. “Tell them to launch,” he muttered.

  The junior officer snapped to and barked out an acknowledgment. Behind Yamamoto a small surge of activity swept over the men on the bridge as they moved to play their part in the next act of this long, strange war. Orders spread outward, bringing the crew of the Yamato to general quarters, and from there out to the Combined Fleet, where they had the same effect.

  On battleships, cruisers, and destroyers men ran to their guns, boots hammering on steel plate, curses and barked commands ringing off the bulkheads. On the fleet carriers Shinano and Hiyo flight crews prepared waves of old-fashioned dive-bombers and torpedo planes. Down in the hangars the last of the nation’s elite fighter pilots awaited the command that would send them aloft to fly combat air patrol over the fleet. A heavy counterattack was expected when the Bolsheviks realized that a new threat had arisen on their southern flank. What form that Soviet attack would take—whether jet planes, or missiles, or something less exotic—nobody could know.

  In a few moments Yamamoto would have to make his way down to the plotting room to control the battle from the nerve center of the mighty ship. Not that there was much to control. Unlike his ill-starred plans for Midway, the arrangements for this encounter were the acme of brutal simplicity.

  The flight deck of the Nagano suddenly blazed into brilliant life as the first of the Ishikawajima Ne-20 turbojets powering Vice Admiral Onishi’s pride and joy fired up. Yamamoto lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes. The sea was quite calm, and the immense mass of the Yamato made for an easy ride. The Nagano leapt toward him in the twinned circles of the looking glasses. The wind was favorable, and the makeshift carrier was already pointed in the general direction of the Soviet armada, about 150 kilometers away on the far side of the volcanic Kurils and the northeastern quarter of Hokkaido.

  Yamamoto prayed that the intervening landmass would hide him from the quarry until the proper time. The fact that no enemy aircraft appeared to be streaking toward them already was a good sign. The Russians were most likely concerned with the next wave of prop-driven tokkotai, which had hitherto always approached from Sapporo, on the far side of Hokkaido.

  On the Nagano jets of white-blue flame threw back the predawn darkness. It was both awesome and terrible, the power he was about to unleash and the sacrifice he was asking of the young men who had willingly turned themselves into his sword. The first fiery lance shot down the length of the ship’s deck. Yamamoto released a pent-up breath as it climbed away. He would never see the long, cigar-shaped plane again. It had a range of only 225 kilometers, enough to carry its payload of nearly fourteen thousand kilos of tri-nitroaminol explosive into the heart of the Soviet fleet, and no farther. The rudimentary ailerons, flaps, and stubby little wings did not provide for anything beyond the most basic maneuverability. The pilots would fly low, straight, and level for most of the distance before plunging their aircraft onto the decks of a targeted vessel at more than a thousand kilometers an hour.

  All of the pilots were volunteers, mostly from the liberal arts faculties of the country’s universities. They had been trained to seek out American capital ships, concentrating on carriers, large troop transports, and any vessels sporting an unusual number of radar domes or antennae, on the assumption that these latter might be some retro-engineered version of the command and control vessels called Nemesis cruisers. There had been no time to retrain for a different opponent, so the Ohkas were flying off with the same instructions.

  Yamamoto could only hope it would work.

  D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0346 HOURS.

  HMAS HAVOC, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Not sure, ma’am. But it looks nasty.”

  Lieutenant Lohrey interrogated the touch screen in front of her, pulling in tight on a view of the odd-looking Japanese carrier. Its runway appeared to have been fashioned into a ramp, a little like the last generation of British and French carriers used back up in the twenty-first. To Willet’s eye it was obviously a kludge, but the planes roaring down it were not. Somebody had invested a shitload of time and money in them.

  She leaned over Lohrey’s shoulder, anxious for a quick verdict, but it was her old boat chief, Roy Flemming, who provided the answer.

  “It looks like a Yokosuka MXY-series special weapon, skipper. The Japs called ’em Ohkas, or Cherry Blossoms. Our guys knew them as Baka. Crazy bombs.”

  While he spoke, Lohrey worked quickly, bringing up all of the files she had on the subject. She knew Master Chief Flemming well enough to trust his call. Back home he probably had a basement full of scale models of the things. And if she didn’t move quickly, he’d start lecturing on them.

  “Okay. Got ’em,” announced the intelligence officer. “In the original time line, the Ohka, Baka, or whatever was produced by the First Naval Air Technical Arsenal, located in Yokosuka. Hence the name. They first appeared in combat on March twenty-first, nineteen forty-five, when fifteen Betty Bombers, carrying piloted rocket bombs attacked Task Group Five-Eight-Point-One. Or they tried to anyway. They got chopped by the air screen about a hundred klicks out before the Bettys could release.”

  “So they started out as air-launched cruise missiles, with a kamikaze pilot to guide them in?” Willet said.

  “Yup.”

  “And now?”

  “Looks like the Japanese have been working some mods,” she answered. The intelligence officer pulled up half a dozen still shots of the sleek, jet-powered aircraft they had spotted on the deck of the carrier. “The first versions of the Ohka ran off a solid fuel and had a range of about fifty-eight kilometers. Later on they switched to thermojets, and then, at the very end, to a turbojet tagged the Ne-Twenty and made by Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries. They picked up range and speed, and there were plans for carrier-launched versions and even land-based models.”

  Willet’s craggy, tattooed boat chief leaned in over the workstation with the two female officers. “If you don’t mind me, Captain, Ms. Lohrey?”

  “Go ahead, Roy,” Willet said.

  The master chief dialed up the maximum magnification on one of the stills, and they waited while rendering software cleaned up the image. Flemming narrowed his eyes to gun slits and sucked at his teeth. Willet suppressed a smile. All he needed to complete the scene was a big piece of straw between those teeth. He grunted and mumbled to himself, chewed at his lip, and scratched his thinning hair.

  “This is no good, skipper. We’ve all been wondering why we haven’t seen any Japanese jet planes, like the German Two Sixty-twos. This is why, I reckon. They poured all the money into these things. Ms. Lohrey will be able to check the archive but as I recall, first time around they didn’t make more than handful of the later-series MXYs. Looks here like they’ve got a hundred or so, just on this one ship. And they’re independent. Don’t need a bomber to launch them. That makes them much trickier for the ’temps to deal with. Originally most of them were destroyed in transit before they launched. With these babies, Yamamoto’s got himself an over-the-horizon strike capability. The Russians are gonna get swarmed by these things. It’ll be like a mini-Taiwan.”

  Willet, who had been leaning forward, straightened up and stretched her back muscles. “The Soviets had a pretty good air defense net over that fl
eet of theirs,” she said. “Nothing too flash, but it does the job, in context.”

  Flemming nodded at the screen. “But these things are out of context, Captain. We’ve been watching them shoot down old prop-driven box kites. These Ohkas are cruise missiles, whichever way you want to cut it.”

  Willet gave her intel boss a querying glance. “Amanda?”

  “I’m with the chief, boss. I think the Sovs are gonna get it in the neck.”

  Willet shrugged. “Oh well. Shit happens. I can see that worried look in your eyes, though, Chief. So fret not. I’m one step ahead of you. Amanda, cut this into a data package for Kolhammer and Spruance. Immediate flash traffic via Fleetnet. This is probably what’s waiting for them in the Marianas if that goes ahead. Chief, you said the Japanese originally worked on a land-based variant on this thing.”

  “More’n that, Captain. They had blueprints for hiding these things in mountain caves—they were gonna shoot ’em out of the cliffs at the Yanks when they got close enough. Probably woulda done some real mischief.”

  “Probably will, you mean.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Willet nodded. All around her the crew in the submarine’s Combat Center maintained their vigil on the fighting. Dozens of screens ran with low-light and infrared coverage of the battlespace. The result was an eerie scene.

  On Hokkaido at least half a million men tore at each other across a sixty-five-kilometer front. In the waters offshore, the Soviet invasion fleet seemed unchallenged. Destroyers and light cruisers steamed up near the coastline to lend gunnery support to their comrades who were pushing inland. Overhead at least two dozen Russian fighters maintained a combat air patrol over the ships at all times.

  “How long?” Willet asked.

  “Not long at all,” Lohrey answered. “Those things are really moving.”