Final impact

“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.