Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  “What’s happening back at the Death Star, Chewie?”

  A heavily bearded sysop pointed at a window displaying one of the Japanese carriers. Touching the tip of his finger to an icon, a small magnifying glass, he pulled in to a virtual height of 150 meters above her decks. “They’re prepping for a conventional attack, Captain. Zeros. Torpedo bombers. Nothing exciting.”

  “Unless you’re on the receiving end,” Chief Flemming said.

  “Captain Willet,” another sysop called out. “Long-range Nemesis scan has another airborne attack forming up out of Sapporo. No visuals, but the returns look like Nakajima One-One-Fives and-Sixes.”

  “Probably going in to finish off the job,” Willet said. “Okay. Amanda, you’ve got some work to do. And I’ve got a call to make.”

  D-DAY + 39. 12 JUNE 1944. 0522 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  Kolhammer ate his breakfast in front of the big screen in operations. At least a dozen officers crowded in around him to watch the Battle of Okhotsk. He finished his toasted muffin and coffee just as the second tokkotai wave arrived over the remains of the Soviet fleet.

  The slower-moving Nakajimas were nowhere near as successful as their colleagues in the Okha attack had been. But it didn’t matter. The sea was already littered with burning debris and floating corpses. After the second wave broke over the survivors, only four destroyers remained afloat. It was a stunning reversal. Admiral Spruance, who’d cross-decked from the Enterprise half an hour ago, stood nursing his own cup of coffee and shaking his head.

  “I suppose this is what they had planned for us,” he mused.

  “Have planned,” Kolhammer said. “I’ll lay money on the barrelhead that they’ve stashed away a whole bunch of those Okhas on the islands. Land basing would give them some real throw weight, too. Sovs got hit with, what, just over a hundred or so? We could be looking at three, four, five times that number. Who knows, could be even more. They haven’t invested in a jet fighter program like the Germans. It’s all gone into this madness.”

  “Madness it may be,” Spruance said, “but it worked. The Russians don’t have any strategic depth in their Pacific assets. You’re looking at everything they had right there.”

  He nodded at the screen.

  Kolhammer brushed crumbs off his fingers. On screen six Nakajimas converged on one Soviet destroyer. He shrugged. “They did a hell of a job throwing that much together,” he said. “The Reds didn’t have a navy worth the name five years ago. They still don’t. Or not anymore, anyway. But think about what it must have cost them in men and materials just to put that task force together. We’ve got to get some recon birds over Vladivostok. I’m betting we’ll see some real changes there.”

  “I don’t see how they could have done it on their own so quickly,” Spruance said.

  “You’re thinking like a liberal. The Sovs wouldn’t blanch at killing two, three million slave laborers to build dockyards and the ships to fill ’em, in the time they had. And I’ll bet they’ve got a lot more twenty-first-century tech than the Nazis or Yamamoto ever let them see during the cease-fire.”

  Deep shadows pooled under Spruance’s eyes, giving his face a hollow, haunted look. “So you’re convinced they got your ship. The Vanguard.”

  “Without a doubt. It would explain what they’ve been doing on their vacation, where all those wonderful toys they’ve been using against Hitler came from. And it would have given them a big head start building that task force Yamamoto just cleaned up. The electromagnetic signals Willet picked up are pretty backward, even compared with our AT stuff. But they were well ahead of where you’d expect them to be at this point. Unless they’ve been cherry-picking something like the Vanguard.

  “It can’t have been Demidenko. Himmler purposely set that up as a waste of resources. They were never going to let Stalin have a look at the good stuff. Question is, what now? Willet has firing solutions on the Japanese. Does she take them down?”

  “We’re going to need to refer this back to Washington,” Spruance said, shaking his head. “Normally there would be no question, but…”

  He trailed off.

  “But,” Kolhammer finished for him, “If we take out Yamamoto, what’s to stop Uncle Joe from raising the Red Star over Tokyo a few weeks down the track. I dunno. Maybe he doesn’t have the power projection capability?”

  “Maybe,” Spruance echoed. “But if he does, we end up dealing with a Communist Japan.”

  “Yeah,” Kolhammer grunted. “Bottom line, we need to know what’s on those islands up ahead of us.”

  29

  D-DAY + 39. 12 JUNE 1944. 1146 HOURS.

  PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  It was relatively safe in this part of the jungle. As safe as it could get on an island full of Japanese soldiers guarding a secret facility on which hung the fate of their empire.

  Denny’s patrol had hunkered down about three-quarters of the way up the large limestone hill that dominated the island. Hastings, his communications specialist, insisted on calling it a mountain, but then Hastings hailed from Kansas, so you could push a small pile of dirt up with the toe of your boot and he was liable to go christening it Mount Something-Or-Other.

  Hastings didn’t seem to be dwelling much on the topography at the moment, though. He was busy taking down the thin wire antennae he’d strung between a couple of trees. He wasn’t grumbling as he did it—he was too well trained, and they were way too deep in the shit for that. But Denny could tell from the awkward stiffness of his movements that he was pissed off.

  Hell, they were all pissed off. That last message they’d gotten might as well have been a death warrant.

  They’d been told to penetrate the subterranean facility and report back today, at all costs. In other words, do it now, or die trying.

  He lay on the spongy floor of the jungle, hundreds of ants and weird unidentifiable bugs crawling over him, and examined the map. They were hiding on a small boggy plateau, no more than fifteen feet long and half that wide, on the heavily forested southern slopes of Mount Something-Or-Other, looking down over the coastal plain where the Japanese had built and then disguised a runway and sunken bunker complex. The last two nights they’d probed the edges of an airfield that was well hidden beneath camouflage that went way beyond a bit of netting and palm fronds.

  Mobile garden beds on giant wheels covered the length of the runway. The aircraft were assembled in vast dugouts covered in yet more living vegetation. A keen gardener himself before the war, Denny would have loved a chance to inspect the setup without having to worry about getting run through with a bayonet, but he’d had to settle for a perilous inspection, from a short distance, in the dead of night. It was nonetheless an impressive piece of work.

  Impressive, too, was the excavation that had obviously been carried out to enlarge a natural cave system at the base of Mount Something-Or-Other. But a close inspection there had proved impossible. A platoon of Japanese marines was on guard just back inside the mouth of the main entrance, twenty-four hours a day. They very rarely ventured outside, and they never left the post unless relieved by another, equally dedicated bunch of nips.

  It was infuriating was what it was.

  And now they’d been told to go in anyway.

  “This’ll be that fucking Kolhammer, you know,” Corporal Barbaro muttered into Denny’s ear. “Those fucking marines of his, they were pissed about us getting—”

  “Stow it, Tony,” Denny said. “Let just get the job done.”

  Barbaro shut up, but his face said it all. The others pulled in close as Denny smoothed out the map.

  “I figure our best chance is to go in through one of those air shafts they drilled. They cut ’em outta the limestone, so it’s not gonna be like banging around inside a metal pipe. If we’re real careful, we keep the noise down, chances are we can get in and out.”

  Chances, bullshit, Denny thought. If he’d really believed the shafts were an option, th
ey’d have used them a day ago. He had no idea whether the things were even navigable. The nearest one, about four hundred yards away, opened out into a rough circle about two and a half feet in diameter. But they might taper down to a fraction of that. Whoever went in might have to negotiate a vertical drop of a hundred feet or more. The handholds would probably be nonexistent.

  But orders were orders, and they had to try to get inside.

  At all costs.

  Barbaro was probably right. Talk was that Kolhammer’s marines, those Eighty-second guys, were pissed as hell that they were being held back from the important jobs because nobody would trust them. They were always bragging about the “special” operations “their” outfit was supposed to have done, even though most of the guys in that unit had never seen combat. In fact, most of ’em were ’temps who’d transferred in. Maybe some of the original Eighty-second guys mighta done something worth bragging about, back up in their own war. They’d sure as hell kicked some ass when they’d helped retake Hawaii. But they were outnumbered about three to one by all the Johnny-come-lately types who’d filled out the two extra battalions the Eighty-second had put on.

  So who knew? Maybe they were being sent on some kind of suicide mission, just because somebody in Jones’s brigade had been bragging that his guys coulda done it, and so some two-star asshole up Denny’s chain of command goes, Yeah, well, my guys could beat your guys into those caves any fuckin’ day.

  In Denny’s experience with the military, that was exactly the sort of shit that got guys like him killed all the fucking time.

  “Right,” he said, “the clock’s ticking on this one, so we have to move out in daylight. Barbaro, you’re taking point. Hastings, you be ready to set up as soon we get there. Even if they tumble us while we’re inside, we gotta get word back to the fleet what we find. Everyone understand?”

  They did.

  They were dead men.

  The five marines moved as quickly as they dared. The jungle was both a help and hindrance. It provided the best possible cover: the underbrush was so dense that a man a few yards away could remain undetected, as long as he had good camouflage and knew how to keep his ass still.

  Of course that meant they could easily run into some Jap who knew his business, too, except that Denny was betting they weren’t setting up ambushes on an island they thought they owned. The Japs patrolled, and they were good at it. But his guys were better. Part of the reason they were better, though, was because they were careful—or had been, at least. Now it was to hell with caution, we gotta haul ass.

  Where they might have taken four hours to cover the ground to the airshaft, he gave ’em two. It was still slow going, but to Denny it felt rushed.

  Barbaro was his best guy on point. For an Italian city kid he was a natural in the jungle, and he adjusted to the increased tempo a lot better than Denny. The other men in his patrol, privates Stan Sanewski, Pete Hastings, and Gwynne Davis, had all done a year of jungle warfare training in northern Australia, and had spent the last six months spooking around the highlands of New Guinea, sharpening their edge against the remaining enemy forces down there.

  Denny had come to understand something that Barbaro seemed to know instinctively. The jungle was neutral. It wasn’t your friend, or your enemy. It was just there and you had to deal with it, same as the Japs did. They had learned that the island was crisscrossed by paths, some of them wide enough for three men to walk down shoulder-to-shoulder. But although one ran right past the airshaft, Barbaro kept them off the track, something the instructors had emphasized in the training center Down Under.

  The double-canopy jungle reached out for them with thorny creepers, gnarled roots, and stinging vines. The steep floor was a boggy mulch of rotting vegetation, crawling with snakes and centipedes. It threatened to give way in small localized mudslides at random intervals.

  Once, they had to stop and wait while a twelve-man enemy patrol moved along the nearby path, just yards away. The terrain had forced them closer and closer to the track, which looped back on itself a couple of times as it descended. Barbaro waited until they could confirm that the Japanese had made it all the way down to the coastal plain. They had just moved off again when Pete Hastings hand-signed…

  Stop.

  Denny frowned, turning on the marine with a pissed-off expression. Hastings was pointing at something on the scarp above them, but glancing up there Denny couldn’t make out anything through the curtain of fat pandanus leaves and dense lianas. He showed Hastings his open palms and shrugged as if to say, So what?

  The marine pointed up in the direction of the rock face again and silently mouthed, Look.

  Denny had no idea what he was supposed to be looking at. Palm fronds, creaking tree trunks, thick stands of bamboo, a mess of creepers, all of them swaying in the breeze. He was about to tell Hastings to knock it off when the gray rock face moved. He shook his head like a kid seeing a magic trick for the first time.

  The palm trees swayed again and he distinctly saw the supposedly solid gray rock flex in and out a couple of inches.

  Goddamn, he thought.

  The news from home was the best tonic Lieutenant Yukio’s men could have hoped for. There had been no official announcement of the grand admiral’s stunning counterstroke off Hokkaido, just as there had been no official announcement of the Russian attack on the Home Islands in the first place. But rumors traveled fast, even all the way down here, and as Yukio toured the eastern hangar from which he would begin his last flight in a matter of days, he noticed that the men went about their work with just a bit more snap in their steps and steel in their spines.

  The treachery of the Communists, the technology of the Americans—in the end none of it was proof against the warrior spirit of the Nipponese fighting man. The gaijin went on with a lot of rubbish about loving life, but in the end they simply feared death and eschewed sacrifice. They were weak, and they would fail.

  Yukio walked down the line of waiting Ohkas, stopping every now and then to share a word with a ground crew chief or one of the other pilots, some of whom had also quite obviously heard of news from Okhotsk. It was amazing how just a glimmer of hope could change a man’s whole outlook. Yukio had been assiduously tending to the men’s morale, as was his duty. And for the most part they had remained steadfast in the face of their approaching deaths. But now he could sense a real eagerness to launch themselves at the enemy. Everyone here knew that their sacrifice could make a real difference, and that was all they needed to dedicate themselves anew.

  As he passed a rocket plane with its cowling open and three technicians messing about inside, he noticed a small sheet of paper by a toolbox at their feet. Someone had inscribed a few lines of poetry that seemed to sum up the feelings of everyone on the island.

  Little clear streams rustle

  Down through the mountain rocks

  And finally let the battleship

  Float on the sea.

  Tiny drops of water they might be, as individuals, but together they would be a mighty flood sweeping their enemies away. One of the techs looked over his shoulder, his face lighting up as he recognized Sekio.

  “A fine day for a walk, Lieutenant,” quipped Onada, the oldest and most experienced of the crew chiefs on the island. “So sunny, and such a fresh mild breeze.”

  Yukio snorted at the joke. They were buried beneath millions of tons of rock. The cavernous space smelled of oil, rubber, chemicals, and body odor. And none of the ground technicians had felt the sun on his face for weeks.

  “A fine day, indeed, Chief Onada. A fine day for it.” He smiled in reply. “No sign of our German comrades, then?”

  “They are working in the southern cave this morning, Lieutenant. I cannot say I miss them. A surly bunch, those Germans. And only too happy to give the impression that they think themselves better than the emperor himself.”

  Yukio made a helpless, accepting gesture. “What are we to do about it, Chief? We wouldn’t be here without their help.�
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  Onada pish-poshed the very idea with a grunt and the wave of a thick-fingered, oil-stained hand. A true nationalist, he simply would not hear of it. “Tinkerers and copycats, that’s all they are,” he insisted. “Anyone can copy the design for a rocket if they have the blueprint. But only a truly creative culture would devise a use for such things in the way that we have. And—”

  The lieutenant essayed a dampening gesture with both hands. “You do not need to convince me, Chief Onada. I agree with you. But now I must continue my inspection. Has anyone checked the tunnels this morning?”

  “Bah! You worry needlessly. Here is this morning’s real work,” Onada said, patting the dull white nose cone of the Ohka.

  “Then I shall do it myself,” Yukio said. “I know you think it a waste of time, but what would happen if falling rocks blocked a launch rail, hmm? This whole base might be blown into the sky like Krakatoa. So I will check.”

  He set off again, purposely striding toward the sheer rock wall at the end of the cavern. It was clear at the moment, but come launch day it would be a maze of cranes and gantries as the Cherry Blossoms were moved into place for takeoff.

  It really wouldn’t do not to check the tunnels every day. They were effectively nothing less than the barrel of a gun out of which he and his men would fly at the Americans like human bullets, hopefully with the same success their comrades had enjoyed against the Bolsheviks.

  And just like a good soldier, Yukio felt the need to clean and check his gun every day. So he headed for the closest of the steel ladders that led up to three circular openings about ten meters off the floor of the cave.

  Looks like an old mine shaft or something, Denny thought.

  The tunnel was obviously man-made. It was too regular to be a natural formation. A rough oval shape, it was much wider than it was tall. Chisel blows had disfigured the soft limestone walls, and two small rails ran downslope toward a much larger cavern beyond the tunnel mouth. It was well lit down there, and, he could see and hear that it was full of men and machinery.