Final impact

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.