Final impact

If nothing else, the men’s morale was high, which was only to be expected. They had fought a great battle against a superior foe, and had comprehensively bested him. The situation on Hokkaido itself was not nearly so clear-cut, however. The Soviets still had significant forces intact, and although they were now cut off from reinforcement, they were going to be very difficult to defeat.

Already the defense of the Home Islands had been thrown into disarray by the Communists’ surprise attack. Yamamoto wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be protecting the Marianas. Some of the army divisions now fighting on Hokkaido were supposed to be preparing for the defense of Guam.

The wreckage of the Soviet Pacific Fleet was an apt metaphor for his own personal feelings, Yamamoto realized. As the Yamato made steam for the waters of the northwest Pacific, it left behind a sea of bobbing, burning flotsam. His men had achieved something akin to a miracle here, yet the grand admiral felt burned out and cast adrift. He wondered whether anyone would even remember the feats performed today by the Imperial Japanese Navy, in the Battle of Okhotsk.

Probably not, if the Bolsheviks prevailed.

Perhaps, if the Allies won.

A lieutenant appeared at his elbow with a folded piece of paper. “A message, sir. From Admiral Onishi.”

Yamamoto took the note and read it in silence. His face remained a stone mask, but inside, as he absorbed the information the communique contained, he felt as though he were in free fall. Tumbling end over end toward oblivion.

No, there would be no repeat of the success of the Ohka raid. Onishi had just sent word, coded via a onetime pad.

Spruance and Kolhammer had destroyed the hidden bases from which his special attack forces would have struck at them.

The Marianas lay open and defenseless.

D-DAY + 40. 13 JUNE 1944. 0314 HOURS.

HMAS HAVOC, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“Firing solutions laid in, Captain. We have four target locks. Yamato, Musashi, and two unidentified cruisers.”

“Thank you, weapons. Keep ’em locked up, but hold fire for now.”

Jane Willet stood with her arms folded, staring at the flat-panel display on which she could see at least nine major surface combatants. Two were burning brightly amidships, hours after the Soviet air attack out of Vladivostok, but it remained to be seen whether the damage they’d taken was fatal. The Havoc’s CI had drawn light blue boxes around them. No sense wasting a perfectly good torpedo on a dying ship.

Flashing red target boxes lay around four of their sister ships. Two of them were behemoths-the battleships Yamato and Musashi. Two were flattops.

More likely than not Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamato sailed on the Yamato. Was he on the bridge right now? There…in the lower left-hand corner of the screen? She could pick it out quite easily in both infrared and LLAMPs mode.

A couple of years ago she would have been able to put a hypersonic combat mace through the blast windows and drop it into his lap from six hundred klicks away. If she wanted to take him down this morning, though, things would have to get a lot more intimate. The Havoc’s retrofitted ADCAP torpedoes only had a range of six thousand meters. She’d have to go in under the destroyer screen to launch.

It wasn’t a particularly daunting prospect, really. Most likely, the Japanese wouldn’t even know she was there until the warheads went off.

Sitting thirty-five kilometers away, stalking her prey via the Big Eye drones hovering far above the enemy, Willet rubbed at her hot, tired eyes and weighed the options. The Japanese had done reasonably well at beating off the MiG-15s that had shown up a few hours back. According to the Big Eye sensors, they had controlled their fire using a fleetwide radar system similar to the Siemens models the Germans had been deploying with their triple-A batteries.

But for now the question was, what was she going to do?

The last of Japan’s heavy hitters were sitting squarely within her crosshairs. As weakened as she felt without her original armory to call on, she still had more than enough firepower to rip the heart out of the Imperial Japanese Navy, or what was left of it.

Whether or not it would be wise to do so was another matter.

Willet stared at the screen where the enemy ships appeared to be heading south again. A few feet to the left was another display, wherein the land battle for Hokkaido continued. The Soviets had stopped their advance and appeared to be digging in, awaiting resupply that would now probably never come-certainly not by sea, anyway. Did the Sovs have the capacity to build an air bridge to the island?

Nobody knew.