Final impact

His old enemies Nimitz and Halsey were numbered among the latter, and he could not help but feel some residual shame about that. Unlike many others, he did not blame Hidaka for the loss of the Hawaiian Islands. The young officer had been appointed as the civil governor of the colony, not its military ruler.

That responsibility had fallen to General Ono, and the phantom soldiers of the Negro marines’ unit, the Eighty-second, had murdered him just before the first rocket impact. A terrible thing it had been, too, the way they had ritually humiliated him in his death, and then openly proclaimed their savagery as a valid punishment for his “crimes.” Yamamoto often wondered if that was to be his fate one day. At any rate, Hidaka could not be held responsible for losing the islands. He could, however, be blamed for the abuses of the Americans held under his control, which had done so much to enrage their countrymen and allies, spurring them on to greater efforts in retaking the territory.

Similarly, all the blood and treasure spent in the failed conquest of Australia had come to naught. His forces had been driven from that island continent, and Prime Minister Curtin had then turned around and released the Australians who came through the Emergence, allowing them to assist in the retaking of Hawaii and the hunt for the Dessaix-it was exactly what Yamamoto had hoped to avoid. All of it attributable, in his opinion, to the ham-fisted brutality of Hidaka. Yamamoto’s vision glazed over. His mind wandered away from the hot, rank planning room and back to the images of Japan’s short-lived occupation of Hawaii. He could not help feeling some approval at the form of Halsey’s death. The man had lived up to his nickname, charging like a bull at a company of Japanese marines, pistols blazing in both hands as they shot him down. Nimitz, however, had been summarily executed, as had hundreds of other high-ranking officers. It was an act of criminal stupidity, given the intelligence that might have been extracted from them, and-Yamamoto fervently believed-it was barbarous. Unworthy of a true warrior.

Hidaka had no excuses for that. Like Yamamoto, he had been educated in America, and he understood the nature of his enemy with much greater fidelity than many of their countrymen. Perhaps, more to the point, he did not understand himself and his own culture well enough. There was nothing in the code of bushido that should lead a true samurai to commit such grotesque atrocities as Hidaka had visited upon his vanquished foes.

A sigh at last escaped Yamamoto. A small exhalation of stale air, and a slumping of the shoulders under the weight of his own responsibility for all that had transpired. Around him, preparations continued without pause. Messengers arrived. Junior officers attended to the demands of their superiors. Staff officers worked through scenarios they had examined from every possible angle uncountable times before. Intelligence about the enemy’s movements arrived as the tiniest drops of ice water on the swollen tongue of a man dying from thirst. It wasn’t just that the Allies had access to unbreakable cryptography, thanks to Kolhammer. Not every unit in their order of battle could be so equipped. But there was also a tsunami of disinformation to be picked through, hundreds of thousands of false radio messages sent quite openly, to distract and disarm.

And regardless of the restrained but growing excitement around him, Yamamoto was transfixed by something that frightened him more than all else, something nobody here seemed to see: the specter of the world he was working to create. A world in which men like Jisaku Hidaka and Heinrich Himmler were armed with atomic weapons.

“A grim business, yes, Admiral, but I place my faith in the Cherry Blossoms and the spirit of Shikishima.”

The voice of the First Air Fleet commandant, Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, cut through Yamamoto’s maudlin self-indulgence. The grand admiral lifted his chin off his tunic, where it had been resting while darker thoughts got the better of him.

Yamamoto had not been looking forward to this conversation. Vice Admiral Onishi was that most dangerous of creatures, a romantic. To Yamamoto’s way of thinking, he was nigh on obsessed with the martial virtue of self-sacrifice-a reasonable thing, one might have thought, except that Onishi took it to unreasonable lengths. He was known both here and in the twilight world of the Emergence barbarians as the father of the kamikaze- although nobody in the Imperial Japanese Navy used that insulting form of words. To them he was the creator of the tokkotai-the special attack units.

Suicide bombers.