Pearl Harbour - A novel of December 8th (37 page)

“And that is?”

“Wartime rationing is so tight that hemlines have gone up quite a bit to conserve on cloth. For this old bachelor, rather a thrill.”

James looked at him and forced a smile.

“My London, my old London, most of it is gone. There seems to be a perpetual grit in the air now, everything dusty, worn looking from the constant pounding. Perversely, the only bright spot is that at least the two dictators finally turned on each other. Reports coming out of Russia are horrific, but they still seem to be holding on.”

“And do you think they will hold?”

“Hitler didn’t snatch Moscow in August when he had the chance; last report is the freeze is on, the mud rock solid. They’re moving again but I’ll bet what was stationed in Siberia and Mongolia is now waiting for them.”

Cecil was touching into “their” territory now, and James found himself actually looking around. Even the most casual conversation about the war that in any way whatsoever might touch on Japan was forbidden outside “the dungeon,” as they called it.

And yet he knew who this man really was, besides being a friend.

“It’s all right,” Cecil said. “If you want I can show you the letter of introduction signed by the PM himself, it’s right here,” and he pointed to his breast pocket.

“I know, but still, I don’t have such a letter from our president; you know the old game.”

“Even between allies and friends standing on the edge of the abyss,” Cecil replied sadly.

James nodded and lowered his head.

“You stopped over here to talk with me officially, I mean actually officially in an unofficial way, is that it?”

“Nice play of words, James, but yes. The PM is eager for anything you chaps might have, anything. I can tell you that back in Washington and London they’re building the same setup that you and I worked under in the last war. You’ve heard of Donovan?”

“Wild Bill?” James said, with a bit of a grin.

“He’s setting some things up,” Cecil announced. “It’s not my place to say anything, but perhaps there might be something for you with his team.”

James sighed and held up his left arm showing his “claw.” “I doubt if they’d want a one-handed sailor,” James said softly.

“Bastards,” Cecil mumbled. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get over to see you before you were shipped back.” He reached over and patted James on the knee.

James said nothing. Strange, of late he felt a certain detachment from it all. The seething rage going into the background noise of life. The flying, introduced to him by Fuchida, soothed things a bit, and his work, so damn boring and numbing at times, was, in a boylike sort of way, a means of shoving it back under the table.

“You wrote me about Nanking,” James said. “I read your reports, saw the pictures. What you went through makes Panay pale.” He held the claw in front of Cecil. “I think I’d kind of stand out if you are talking about the old cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

Cecil laughed. “They want your brains, James, not that hook of yours; though I daresay it’d be rather effective in tearing out the guts of some Jap.”

“A bit bloodthirsty, aren’t we?” James replied, surprised by the vehemence in his friend’s voice.

“Thought you’d be too,” Cecil replied coldly. “After what I saw at Nanking, the hell with all the bastards.”

“Even your cadets, our friend Fuchida?”

“You still count him a friend? Hell, when I interviewed him a couple months after Nanking and Panay, I heard no apology there. I almost feel that was deliberate on his part.” He shook his head.

“No, that friendship is dead. I left him your address. Have you heard from him?”

“No,” James replied a bit wistfully. “I did try and reach him a few times, sent him a picture of me and my plane. No reply.” “Then that settles it as far as I’m concerned. But back to this other job. Are you interested?” James looked at him, incredulous.

“Well, would I be? The answer is definitely a yes.”

Cecil smiled. “Their efforts are primarily focused on Germany of course, but I think both you and I know that will change dramatically before the year is out, very dramatically. And when it does certain people are going to be head-hunting for chaps like us who don’t just know the language, but know the people, the way they think, who they are, and that, old friend, defines you and me to a tee.”

James looked around again, still a bit uncomfortable. “Okay, as you Yanks say, I’ll talk first. You can answer or not as you see fit.”

James simply nodded.

“We both know that the Northern School, as they call it, is dead, though there are still a few in our services who think the Soviets are on the edge of collapse and no matter what Tojo is now planning, the army would rather jump northward and cut off a part of the dying corpse than fight a war where they will be highly dependent on the navy.”

James again nodded.

“So south it is. I give it four weeks, six at most, perhaps two on the inside bet.”

“Two is out,” James said softly. “What little I can ...”

He hesitated; even to say “decrypt” made him uncomfortable.

“What little I can see. The playing pieces are not in position yet. Too much open signal traffic. It’s when they turn it all off, that to me is the countdown.”

“I agree. I’m guessing around the twenty-fifth of next month. Christmas and all that; everyone will be on holiday.” “Dangerous though. We might just second-guess that as well and go to a higher alert. Besides, they know the sacredness of that day to us. They do want a war, but they do not want a vengeance match; and to attack on Christmas Day, that’s asking for vengeance in the name of the Prince of Peace.”

“Nice turn of phrase there,” Cecil replied.

“So it’s somewhere in between, you’d guess.”

Again he hesitated. “Strictly my own vision, of course,” James said, and he could not resist the deliberate gesture of taking off his glasses and pulling out a dirty handkerchief to clean them.

“Of course, just your vision.”

“Four to five weeks. They have taken to increasing the frequency of code changes. I tell you it is driving us to the point of insanity.”

“I can see that,” Cecil replied smiling, pointing to James’s stained blouse and trousers, then with a friendly gesture ran the back of his hand across his stubbly face.

“Certainly a picture for a recruiting poster either for your navy or, as you say, an insane asylum.”

“You’ve done the work. You know what I mean.”

Cecil nodded. “At least last time it was a Western-based language, and we got some lucky breaks with their lax attitude about coding books in embassies. Not this time I take it.”

James shook his head.

“Almost makes one wish we had some magic,” Cecil said, this time looking closely at James.

James, glasses still off, was glad they were off. Not even to the closest of friends on the same team would he ever say that one word . . . Magic. It was the encrypting machine for Japanese diplomatic messages, one of the closest of all secrets. There was speculation that the Japanese Consulate Office had one, and there had been endless late-night discussions over coffee about bringing in some professional safecracker, maybe somebody even from the Mob on the mainland to pull a job off.

One of the team was from New Jersey, and he said he knew half a dozen who could pull it off for the right “consideration.” The trick was to get it out, take it apart, photograph and measure everything, put it back together, and then do a second burglary job the same night to get it back in. Impossible, but fun to speculate about. If they were ever caught, the isolationist hotheads in Congress would skin all of them alive, CinCPac would deny he ever knew about it, the State Department would scream for a hanging ... and the Japanese would junk the machine and go with something entirely different. As it was, they did have a handle on some of the messages thanks to the IBM calculating machines down in the dungeon, but having a real one would be better than anything a cryptologist could ever dream of holding.

He looked straight at Cecil and said nothing. The silence, though, was, he realized, answer enough, and his friend chuckled.

They sat in silence for several minutes, Cecil finishing his sandwich, poking around a bit at the potato salad, James just drinking his coffee, the idea of roast beef just not sitting right at this time of day.

“And your destination?” James finally asked.

“Flight leaves this afternoon at one. From here to Wake to refuel. Then across the long haul to Guam, then Manila, then Hong Kong. From Hong Kong I then head down to Singapore. A week or so if the weather cooperates.”

“Amazing. Jump the entire ocean in a week. When we were kids it took a month or more, and that by fastest steamer.” “And for our old friends in Japan, they can see it the other way,” Cecil replied. “Ever hear of a chap named Genda?” James processed that. The name Genda was familiar. Something about their War College.

“He was naval attaché in London during the Blitz. Has us worried a bit. We know he’s a smart one. At the height of the battle, he wasn’t down in the basement cowering with the rest of their embassy staff. We had a report he used to go to one of the bridges and just stand out there, watch, and take notes. He might have drawn some conclusions from both sides. If he did, and he has someone like Fuchida testing them out, it could spell trouble for us someday.”

“So you and your old friend had a falling out.”

“War does that,” Cecil said, a touch of anger now in his voice. “You only saw the photographs and newsreels of Nanking. Remember, I was there, and I will never forget it.

“Nor forgive it.”

“Why bring him up?” James asked.

“Just the thought that he returned back to Japan the same way I’m now traveling, by the Pan Am clipper planes. He had days to observe, to think. Writing up a little speculation on it for the PM along with my other notes. Imagine a Japan with five hundred such planes, based forward, say some of the islands up off Alaska for example.”

“Absurd, Cecil,” James replied, “The logistics of supporting that many aircraft up there; anyone who tried it would be insane.”

“All right then, I’ll grant that, but elsewhere, and the thought they could range the entire Pacific in a day.”

“They have no such planes, nor the fuel to feed them. Even the Germans must be feeling that pinch. Thank God it is we who hold nearly all the world’s oil. The one who controls oil... until some other energy comes along, like those atoms that Wells fellow writes about, well, we have the trump card.”

“I agree,” Cecil replied. “I guess I’m not making it clear enough. It is the thinking of the application of mass across a vast distance that was undreamed of in the last war. Move two, three, four thousand miles and then strike with five hundred, a thousand planes. The Germans had that number of planes, far more, actually, but they never quite grasped how to use them in mass, in one direct killing blow against the most important target. It was not our factories, at least in the short term, though in a long, protracted war that might be different. It was to kill the RAF itself by shooting them down and bombing them and bombing them until they smashed apart. That is where Herr Goering made his mistake, and I think this Genda must have seen that and reported it.

“How many carriers do you have out here now?” Cecil asked, completely shifting topics and pointing over to where the Enterprise and Lexington were docked.

James chuckled. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“I’m guessing three,” Cecil replied. “Those two there, maybe Saratoga nearby. They have seven, will soon have nine if our scanty intelligence from inside Japan is accurate.” Again James did not reply, but the number was right. One of his listeners claimed he knew the “fist,” the subtle nuances of different telegraphers, and could pick out the Kaga and Akagi in less than a minute, as distinct, he would say in his Texan drawl, as the way a Yankee from Boston sounded to him.

“They don’t have the clipper planes and hell, for that matter nor do we. Your longest-range planes, your 17s and the new 24s, can range, at best, a thousand miles, maybe fifteen hundred if stripped down. But the carriers now. At flank speed they can leap six hundred miles in a day, across the Pacific in a week if they pushed it. Seven carriers, five hundred planes or more for a killing strike.”

Could it be here? All along from CinCPac on down the speculation from day one had been that it would be to take out MacArthur and the ragtag army he was ever so slowly, far too slowly, trying to organize in the Philippines, while constantly complaining about the need for yet more men, planes, and supplies and often blaming the navy for any delay. It was said that Kimmel had finally announced the only reason MacArthur had taken that post was because it was the only military position he could have where he could call himself a field marshal and get away with it, with enough gold lace on his hat to deck out a Paris streetwalker.

“What about Singapore?” James finally asked.

“What the PM thinks, and that, dear friend, is a confidence between friends and no further. Call it a sign of trust.”

“Fine then.”

“Why use carriers on Singapore when land-based planes out of Indochina can do the job? Once you have Singapore, the oilfields of Sarawak and the Celebes in the Dutch East Indies fall by default.”