Final Impact (31 page)

“I think I’d better call him,” Kolhammer said, shaking himself out of his reverie.

D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1429 HOURS.
USS
KANDAHAR,
PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“It’s got nothing to do with that rapist motherfucker,” Jones said.

“I wouldn’t hold it against you if it did,” Kolhammer replied.

Mike Judge had left him to it, carrying away the remains of their so-called lunch. Kolhammer hadn’t dicked around when he’d called the marine officer, asking him why he’d thought it necessary to cut the press in on the Danton e-mail.

“She’s not just press, she’s one of my original embeds. I
trust
her.”

“And not me?”

“That’s unfair, Admiral. You’re tied down by politics. Marge Francois got a clean match on his blood and semen. As good as a needle in the arm, where we came from. And you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. That file is sitting in somebody’s bottom drawer back in Washington, stamped
TOO FUCKING HARD
, and meanwhile he’s rolling around the country copping blow jobs from movie stars.”

Kolhammer kept himself still, stifling the urge to drum his fingers on the desktop where Jones could see and hear his frustration via the video link.

“You might want to recall, Lonesome, that Ms. Duffy was a big part of creating the guy.”

Jones nodded on screen. “And she’d send him to Hell in a goddamn New York minute if she knew about that match.”

Kolhammer couldn’t argue with that. He knew Duffy well enough after two years to be able to understand her on a professional, if not personal, level. He doubted that even Dan Black had really known what went on deep inside her heart. He leaned back and showed Jones his open palms, conceding the other man’s point.

“Lonesome, it was a personal communication. Granted, it was about military concerns—but I’ll stand behind your decision to release it. It’s not like you sent her the attachments, after all.”

“No, it’s not. And thank you.”

Kolhammer shook his head.

“You don’t have to thank me. You have a right to expect my support, and you haven’t always had it when you needed it, the last few years.”

It was Jones’s turn to shake his head. “You’ve had your own battles to fight, Admiral. That shitty business with Hoover and his pet congressmen. The Zone. The Old Navy. I haven’t been looking for you to get my back because I knew you had a full-time job watching your own.”

Jones’s image loomed in the monitor as he leaned toward the camera.

“Just so as we’re clear. I don’t blame you for the Anderson-Miyazaki thing, either. I know you went to the mat. It was almost like they were using it as a lesson.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Do you really want to go there?”

“Probably not, but go on.”

“I don’t think the little prick was alone. Our War Crimes people said there was evidence of at least four attackers. And as big as he is now, I don’t think he could have avoided the payback unless he had someone protecting him. We don’t even know how he came to cross paths with Anderson and Miyazaki. There was a curfew, if you remember. And that drunken asshole they assigned to the case was like a fucking caricature of a bad cop. He was never gonna make it happen. You want my opinion, someone let the ’temps smack a few of our guys down. Make sure we understood who the big dogs were.

“I don’t think they meant for things to get outta hand like they did, but that cracker asshole was a ticking time bomb. They were probably hoping he’d get himself killed by the Japs, and his buddies with him. But true or not, none of this will ever be tested, because it’s such a septic mess now it’s gotta be buried so deep nobody can ever dig it up.”

“Jesus, Lonesome. You should have written for television or something. You really believe all that?”

Jones threw his hands up. “What I believe is irrelevant, isn’t it?”

Kolhammer opened his mouth to say that no, it wasn’t, but he couldn’t.

“Okay, look,” he said instead. “On your brother-in-law, I’ve already sent a heads-up to Spruance and Pearl, insisting that Danton’s message goes onto the record. Even if you hadn’t sent it on to Duffy, I would have had it released in the Zone. So it is going to happen, one way or another.”

Jones nodded brusquely.

Kolhammer continued. “On this other stuff, I don’t know. There
will
be consequences. I can’t say what, exactly, but you’re probably right in thinking that somebody wanted us to understand our place in the world, at least as far the investigation went. Making any headway on that case was like pushing wet sand uphill. And I promise you that when I get back, if I don’t get some satisfaction, I’m gonna nuke the fucking hill. And if that gets us nowhere, then there’s always the Room.

“Okay?”

A shadow of a smile passed across the marine’s features. “Okay.”

“Now,” said Kolhammer. “Last I recall, we were supposed to be at war or something. How’s that going on your end?”

25

D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0012 HOURS.
HIJMS
YAMATO,
PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

Long before the Kuril Islands appeared over the horizon, Yamamoto could see evidence of the firestorm raging around them. The first signs of the titanic battle became obvious as the Combined Fleet steamed up past the southern reaches of Hokkaido. The new Siemens radarscopes picked up faint returns from the waves of
tokkotai
streaming north to throw themselves on the Bolshevik invaders.

Standing on the bridge of the mighty
Yamato,
peering into a deep obsidian darkness that seemed to flicker with the intimation of a great storm, he felt like a boy creeping along the edge of a volcano in which lived unknowable numbers of demons and monsters.

He was going to his doom, of that at least he was certain. Of nothing else but that.

It was the third time he had sortied from Hashirajima at the head of the fleet, and only on the first occasion had he done so with anything approaching a sense of confidence—or rather hubris. That was now what he thought of his mental state before the accursed miracle at Midway.

The attack on Hawaii, which had gone surprisingly well, thanks to Hidaka and the
Dessaix,
had nonetheless occasioned in the grand admiral a crisis of faith. It had been an entirely negative gambit. He’d known then that he had no hope of defeating the Allies. Even before the emergence of Kolhammer’s barbarians, the strategic weight of this struggle lay with the industrialized democracies. Hawaii was taken to buy time, and nothing more.

Time that had proved to be worthless.

Yamamoto steadied himself by laying a hand against the cool metal of a bulkhead as dizziness threatened to sweep his legs out from underneath him. There would be no German atomic bomb. No Japanese revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki—although to be pedantic about it, those events hadn’t yet happened. Even if the Communists had not stabbed them in the back, he doubted they could have held out against the so-called free world. The Americans and British were fanatics, not warriors as he understood the term. They would not rest until their enemies lay charred and dead, in the ruins of a hundred incinerated cities.

“A message, Admiral.”

Yamamoto took the scrap of paper from the earnest young lieutenant. Three seaplanes had gone missing on patrol southeast of the Marianas. They had not reported anything untoward in their last scheduled updates, but their sudden vanishing spoke volumes. Kolhammer and Spruance were moving in.

Yamamoto could not help but feel disappointment that what would surely be his last action would not be against them. He had prepared as well as any man could, given the disparity in the two forces. The battle for the Marianas would probably have ended with the Stars and Stripes flying over the islands, but he was certain that if he had been able to deploy his defenses as he’d planned, he would have struck a heavy, perhaps even a crippling, blow against the old foe.

Instead he was creeping north at the head of a much-reduced Combined Fleet, a force about a third of its original size, to spend himself in a desperate lunge against the emperor’s newest enemies, the godless hordes of Joseph Stalin. He wished he’d never heard of Kolhammer or the Emergence. It would have been better to perish as he was meant to, shot down in 1943. Even defeat and occupation as they had originally played out would have been preferable to enslavement under the Russians, as now seemed to be the fate of Nippon.

He was aware of the grim mood on the bridge of the battleship. There was none of the elation or anticipation of victory he remembered from Midway or Hawaii. How could there be, when he had such limited resources with which to gamble? He had only three carriers under his command, and one of them, the
Nagano,
was a converted cruiser with nothing but
tokkotai
aboard. Once they were launched, she would revert to a simple support role, her offensive capacity entirely used up.

He caught himself shaking his head. There would be no
Kassen Kantai
with the U.S. Navy, no last great decisive battle. His life and the lives of his men would be spent in a hopeless, unplanned stand against an enemy of whom they knew little, other than the fact that he enjoyed a vast superiority in men and matériel.

Yamamoto flexed his injured left hand, which ached with phantom pain. He had lost two fingers fighting against this same adversary almost four decades earlier, at the Battle of Tsushima. That engagement had been a stunning victory over an old, corrupt European regime.

It had heralded a new world.

He feared that this next battle against the Russians would do exactly the same, but with infinitely darker consequences for his countrymen.

D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0232 HOURS.
HMAS
HAVOC,
PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“Captain? You’d best come see this.”

Jane Willet tried to blink the crust of sleep from her eyes, but it was too thick, forcing her to rub away the residue that had accumulated in just a few hours. Not surprising really. She’d been so tired when she turned in that her eyes had been stinging and watery even as she lay her head on the pillow. And stim supplements were just a happy memory.

“S’up,” she croaked at her intelligence boss, Lieutenant Lohrey. “Trouble?”

“As usual.”

Willet hadn’t changed for bed. She’d known she was only ever going to get her head down for a short time, anyway. Shrugging her gray coveralls back on over her shoulders, she accepted a cup of tea from Lohrey.

“Cheers,” she said as she sipped at the steaming mug. “So don’t let me die wondering, Amanda.”

“Looks like the Marianas gig is off,” Lohrey said. “We’ve got a major Japanese force at the edge of the threat bubble, heading toward the Sovs at full clip.”

That got her attention.

Everyone had been wondering what the Japanese would do, faced with a two-front attack. There’d been little evidence of any ground units being moved from the Marianas, but until now the question of the imperial fleet had remained open. Willet sucked down a mouthful of the painfully hot black tea. It completed the job of waking her up.

“Okay. Bring me up to speed.”

The two women squeezed out of her cabin, heading for the Combat Center a short distance away as Lohrey filled her in on the latest.

“All organized resistance on Kunashir and Shikotan appears to be finished. We’re picking up evidence of isolated small-unit clashes there, but nothing of greater significance. Red Army engineers have already begun extending airstrips and repairing the port facilities at Yuzhno-Kurilsk.

“The Hokkaido landings are a bloody mess, but the Japanese just don’t have the forces in depth to hold out. The mass
kamikaze
raids are really fucking with the Sovs, though, focusing on their landing ships, which are banged up pretty badly. Admiral Yumashev is gonna have some explaining to do.”

They entered the sub’s control center and Willet nodded to her executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Grey. A quick glance at a nav screen told her they hadn’t moved from their new station, thirty miles to the southwest of Kunashir, the southernmost island in the Kuril chain. The Sea of Okhotsk had grown too crowded for comfort, and Willet had ordered the boat back out into the northern Pacific. Now, it seemed, they were lying directly in the path of what was left of Yamamoto’s fleet.

“I hear we have company,” she said to her XO. Having removed themselves from right under the keels of the Soviet armada, it was no longer necessary to maintain silent running. In fact, they probably hadn’t really needed to earlier, but Willet had insisted anyway. Better safe than sorry.

Conrad Grey nodded. “We’ve got a Big Eye moving south to cover them, ma’am. No visual yet, but the bird’s arrays have locked on and they’re showing a task force of forty-nine ships, including at least eleven major surface combatants. We’re also picking up indications of some comparatively advanced radar equipment, probably of German origin. The new Siemens sets, if I had to take a punt.”

Willet handed the empty mug to a sailor as she reached the battlespace display at the center of her bridge. Three of the sub’s four drones were airborne and feeding data back to the
Havoc.
At a safe remove from the hostilities, she was able to lurk just beneath the surface to take the signals live. One large screen ran a vision of the Soviet fleet in the waters off Hokkaido—the northernmost of Japan’s main islands—and the southern Kurils. Another featured low-light-amplified pictures of the ground fighting on Hokkaido. But it was a third that claimed her attention, a flatscreen full of computer-generated imagery, representing the approach of Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet.

“How long before we get a visual?”

“Twenty minutes, max,” Grey responded. “That Big Eye is running down. We can’t move her much farther south or we won’t get her back.”

“Okay,” said Willet. “Here’s a Pepsi Challenge. Do we sink them or not?”

Lieutenant Lohrey remained poker-faced.

Her XO smiled mischievously. “That’s why you make the big bucks, Captain. Those calls are way beyond my pay grade.”

“Amanda?”

The intelligence boss shrugged. “You really want my opinion, Captain—let ’em at each other. I think we all know where this bullshit with the Sovs is leading. Yamamoto kills a bunch of these clowns now, just means we won’t have to fight them a few weeks down the road.”

“You’re such a cynic, Amanda.”

“Generational ennui, ma’am. Comes from cleaning up after the boomers and those lazy Gen-X fuckers.”

“Don’t look at me like that, Lieutenant. They ran out of letters for my generation. And for what it’s worth, I think you’re right.

“So here’s my plan. We’re going to sit on our arses and do precisely nothing, Generation-X-style. We’ll just watch this movie nice and quietly. We’ll rip and burn all the data we can get. And in the unlikely event that any of the Japanese survive and turn around to head for Kolhammer and Spruance,
then
we’ll kick the shitter out of them. Concur?”

“Sounds groovy,” Lohrey said.

“XO?”

“As I said, skipper, that’s why you get the big bucks.”

“Actually, it’s pounds nowadays. And not that many of them. All-righty, then, let’s get ready. Prep the last drone. I want full-spectrum coverage of this toga party.”

D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0342 HOURS.
HIJMS
YAMATO,
PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“The
tokkotai
are ready, Admiral. They await your orders.”

Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto stood at the blast windows, hands clasped behind his back, as immovable as Mount Fuji. He could see the outline of the
Nagano
against the faintest hint of approaching dawn. She stood out from the other two surviving flattops because of the radical tilt of her flight deck, designed to fling the Type 44
Ohkas
up into the sky at a twenty-degree angle. The piloted rocket bombs were a marvelous engineering feat, yet also an indictment of the Japanese science and industry and, beyond that, of Japanese society. While this iteration of the original powered rocket bomb was a vast improvement on the primitive efforts mustered by the navy at the end of the original war, it was still a crude attempt to compete with much more advanced technologies now pouring out of factories in America.

He sighed quietly.

No
American
fliers would be asked to turn themselves into living warheads. Their country was already producing missiles that relied on inanimate circuitry to guide them to their targets. Nothing as wondrous as the rockets and death rays—
lasers,
he corrected himself—that had arrived with Kolhammer. But still a great leap beyond what he had to call upon.

“Admiral?”

Yamamoto half turned toward the timid voice. “Tell them to launch,” he muttered.

The junior officer snapped to and barked out an acknowledgment. Behind Yamamoto a small surge of activity swept over the men on the bridge as they moved to play their part in the next act of this long, strange war. Orders spread outward, bringing the crew of the
Yamato
to general quarters, and from there out to the Combined Fleet, where they had the same effect.

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.