Final impact

Yukio stood in the bunker, shaded by netting thickly threaded with camouflage scrim and vegetation. The two sailors standing beside him trained oversized binoculars on the horizon to either side of the growing dot that was the grand admiral’s plane. There was no control tower to bring them in. No radio contact with the outside world. A fully equipped communications room lay in the jungle about two hundred meters away, but the antennae had never been erected and not a single message had ever been sent or received from the secret base. You had to assume these days that if you spoke on a radio, the enemy would hear you, locate you, and, if they felt like it, destroy you.

As frustrating as their isolation could be at times, it was a deadly necessity.

He fancied that he could hear the drone of the seaplane as it dipped through the hot, moist air, its pontoons feeling for the first kiss of the waves. It was still a couple of hundred meters up, but closing rapidly. The angle of approach would take it into a cove on the far side of the soaring headland under which this part of the base had been built. Yukio watched the plane grow larger, its engines sounding louder and louder as it came in. Just before it disappeared from view, cut off by the near-vertical slopes of the heavily forested headland, the pontoons touched down, raising great sails of spray from the green-blue waters of the Pacific.

The two sailors never once broke the rhythm of their ceaseless metronomic scanning of the horizon. He supposed it made sense, although if American jet planes suddenly appeared it would have to be assumed they’d been discovered, and there would be nothing to be done. Stealth was everything. How many times had that been drummed into him, into everyone on the island?

Yukio hurried down the flight line. Dozens of Ohkas waited for their first and last flight. Ground crew tinkered and fussed about them like new mothers with a firstborn. In the end, the only way to be sure the planes would work was to use them. They couldn’t really be tested, could they? But day and night, the technicians were here, including a handful of German officers who very much kept to themselves. When he’d arrived and seen them for the first time, he knew that he was involved in something very special. There was a lot of talk of how closely the Reich and the empire were working nowadays, but you still rarely saw a German in this part of the world. Yukio had never been introduced to them, never spoken to them. He didn’t even know what role they played here, other than that they were somehow involved in maintaining the Ohkas.

They ignored him as he marched past.

The hangar dipped slightly as he headed inland. At the rear, four wide tunnels led underground, reminding him of the mine shafts in his old hometown of Kitamatsu. He hurried into the opening on the far left. It was about three meters wide, two and a half high. Low-wattage bulbs strung out every six meters provided a minimum of illumination.

The temperature dropped as he penetrated farther into the island’s foundation. He was probably under fifteen meters of limestone by now. The walls were damp with condensation. He passed other men moving through the network of tunnels. You could always tell the newcomers. They had to stop and check the maps fixed to the walls at every intersection. Yukio had been here three weeks now, and was intimately familiar with all of those areas he was authorized to be in. There weren’t that many places where he might get lost.

A few turns, a long, almost blacked-out section-three bulbs had blown and not yet been replaced-another turn, and a climb up a spiral staircase carved right into the rock, and he emerged into the reception area. A grand name for a small, buried room in the jungle at the edge of the cove. He saluted the base commander, General Kishi, and his direct superior, Commander Tamai, who were already there. A small launch puttered in toward the shore as the seaplane quickly made ready to leave again, lest its presence be detected.

Yukio’s heart was nearly bursting with pride as he waited for the grand admiral to arrive. And when he saw that Admiral Onishi, the father of all the tokkotai, was with him, it was nearly too much. He was positively levitating.

“Careful,” Tamai whispered. “If you stand any straighter, you’ll snap.”

The two older men chuckled coarsely while the admirals were still out of earshot, but they smartened up when the launch motored in under the overhanging canopy and ran up on the small sandy beach. Yukio was thrilled to see that neither of the visitors stood on ceremony. They alighted from the craft as quickly as possible and hurried deep into the cover of the jungle, their pants and shoes thoroughly soaked by the stagnant water that lay just inside the tree line. They were true fighting men, not just bureaucrats.