Final impact

Yamamoto could not help but feel disappointment that what would surely be his last action would not be against them. He had prepared as well as any man could, given the disparity in the two forces. The battle for the Marianas would probably have ended with the Stars and Stripes flying over the islands, but he was certain that if he had been able to deploy his defenses as he’d planned, he would have struck a heavy, perhaps even a crippling, blow against the old foe.

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 matйriel.

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.