Rising Sun (12 page)

“But first we have to get there,” Sandy said.

Mack died that night, never regaining consciousness. They waited until morning, said some prayers, and gently pushed him into the sea. They’d wrapped him in a sheet so they didn’t have to look at his face as his body bobbed up and down. Nor did they have anything to use as an anchor. Fortune was kind, and the catamaran soon outdistanced Mack’s body. Unspoken was the fear that they’d have to watch while he was devoured by sharks, but that didn’t happen either. In a few minutes, he was gone, out of sight but not out of their minds. He’d been the one who really understood the boat and the ocean.

“We’re all alone, now,” Sandy said.

“Think we’ll make it?” Grace muttered.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Amanda whispered. She wondered what Tim was doing now and what he would do if he was in such a predicament.

* * *

Admiral Yamamoto was angry and frustrated. Once again the foolishness of the code of bushido was hampering operations. His submarine captains had reported numerous sightings of American merchant ships, but few had done anything about it. A score of long-range submarines lay in wait off the major American cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and, farther north, off Portland, Tacoma, and the British base at Vancouver. They, however, were waiting for the American Navy to emerge, not contemptible merchant ships. Sinking the American merchant ships could help cripple the American economy, but that point was lost on the devotees of bushido. He recalled a phrase from his time spent in the United States—with friends like these, who needs enemies?

Their excuses had been piously clever. They reminded him that they only carried a limited number of torpedoes; therefore, the precious weapons should not be wasted against lowly merchant shipping. Once the torpedoes were gone, it meant that the submarines would have to return to Japan for resupply while American and British warships cruised unimpeded. The fact that major American warships did not cruise at all in the Pacific did not deter the devotees of bushido. The goal of the submarine was to kill other warships, and merchant shipping was beneath them.

Regarding the supply of torpedoes, the sub captains had a point, so the first step toward solving their torpedo problem was to seize the large island of Hawaii and utilize Hilo Bay as a base. The other islands, including Oahu and the city of Honolulu, they would continue to ignore. The reinforced American Army garrison was no threat. It was stranded on Oahu.

The distance from Tokyo to San Diego was just under fifty-six hundred miles and using Hilo would cut the trip more than in half. With the American garrison on Oahu helpless and under long-range siege, the attack on Hilo would be a walkover and would largely eliminate the excuse that there weren’t enough torpedoes.

An attack on the Alaskan city of Anchorage was planned. It would give the Japanese Army, now suddenly cooperating with the navy, a North American base and one only twenty-four hundred miles from San Diego. Army Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki commanded the garrison on Attu. His would be the invasion force. His unit would be reinforced, removed from Attu for the invasion, and the northern flank of the Japanese Empire would be protected. He had spoken with Admirals Nagumo, Toyoda, Kurita and Koga and all were in agreement that submarines and other surface warships must attack merchant shipping. Even though Yamamoto was admiral of the Combined Fleet, and senior, the others would also use their considerable influence to get the more junior and more aggressive commanders to comply.

Another solution to the supply issue was the usage of Japanese civilian tankers and freighters to provide the subs with fuel, food, ammunition, and, of course, Type 94 torpedoes while submarines were on station off America’s West Coast. These were just getting into place and would be situated far enough in the central Pacific where it was hoped they wouldn’t be noticed by American patrols. Japan had begun the war with sixty-five submarines, although twenty-one of them were obsolete, with another thirty-seven under construction. They would never be able to keep up with America’s production capabilities.

Therefore, Yamamoto’s goal was to keep at least five subs on station at each of the major American ports where they could inflict maximum damage, while the others were resupplied or were repaired. There were scores of other cities on the coast, but he would need an infinite number of subs to cover them all.

Of course, the Americans were confronted with the same dilemma. They could not place warships all along the length of the American-Canadian coastline. Nor could they protect all their ports even with the many hundreds of airplanes intelligence reports said they were assembling. Nor could their radar cover everything as well. The coast was just too vast.

Even better for Japan, the Americans were condemned to fight from stationary positions while his ships, the subs in particular, could move stealthily and at will to any place and attack in strength before the Americans could respond. At least that was the theory, he thought. He had allowed the Americans far too much time to gather strength after their defeat at Midway. Yamamoto had to admit that he hadn’t expected such an overwhelming victory either and, therefore, had little in the way of concrete plans when it so suddenly occurred.

At least Japanese torpedoes worked, he thought. It didn’t matter how many submarines the Americans had if they couldn’t sink anything with their flawed weapons. There had been so many reports by Japanese captains of American torpedoes going under Japanese ships, or bouncing off their hulls, that he didn’t doubt there was a major issue that must be driving the Americans insane.

* * *

When Dane arrived at his nephew’s camp, Steve Farris immediately and facetiously asked whether he should salute, shake hands, or kiss his uncle on both cheeks. After telling him to go screw himself, Tim laughed and hugged his nephew. It felt good to laugh. It took his mind off Amanda and the litany of defeats the country was enduring.

“Where the hell’s my car?” Dane asked with mock anger.

“Sitting on blocks back home and quietly rusting away. I took the tires off and put them in the basement.”

“Good thinking.” Tires were as valuable as gold. While there was a sufficient amount of gas available if everyone paid attention to the rules of rationing, rubber for civilian uses had virtually disappeared.

Dane had brought enough steaks and beer to feed the platoon, and distributed them, keeping two of the best pieces of sirloin and half a case of beer for the two of them. He assured his nephew that he’d paid for it, and that nobody was going to jail. Steve assured him that he didn’t much care. A third of the platoon was on duty and enough was saved for them. Even though it was Sunday, they would be on duty with their eyes open. It would not be like what happened at Pearl Harbor, that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday in December.

After agreeing, however, that the Japanese were not likely to invade California this particular day, they changed into swimsuits and traipsed down to the water’s edge. The sea was fairly calm and the temperature warm. A pair of seals stared curiously at them from perches on rocks, decided that the two men with pale white skin were insignificant, and went to sleep.

“Rough duty,” Dane said, and Farris only grinned.

“If it wasn’t for my CO, Lytle, it’d be pretty good.”

“I met him on the way in. I decided a courtesy call was in order. He was clearly drunk and didn’t much care what I did. I was going to leave him a steak just to show what a good guy I am, but screw him.”

“And leaving him some beer would be like taking coals to Newcastle,” Steve laughed. “I’ll probably hear about my not telling him you were coming. I’ll just lie and say you surprised me as well, but now you know what I’m dealing with. I keep him informed about everything I see, including ships that I identify thanks to a copy of
Jane’s
that I had to buy out of my own money. He’s as much as told me to quit bothering him.”

“How does he get away with it?” Dane asked.

“Easy. Major Harmer is the battalion CO and he’s totally dominated by Lytle. Rumor has it he’s as big a lush as Lytle. A lot of us wish the Japs would swoop in some dark and stormy night and carry them away. Of course, with our luck they’d be returned.”

Dane smiled. “Give me some time and maybe I can arrange for somebody in the army’s chain of command to make a surprise visit.”

“That’d be nice. I admit there’s likely only one chance in a million that the Japs will show up here, but I think it pays to be at least a little vigilant. Now, what are you up to with the navy?”

Dane told his nephew about his ordeals on the
Enterprise
and his rescue of Spruance. He didn’t spare the details, including Spruance’s wish to be killed rather than captured. He knew his nephew would keep his mouth shut. Farris’s eyes widened as he took in the gruesome firsthand story of the U.S. Navy’s second major defeat in the still-young war.

“That landed me in intelligence, which would better be named lack of intelligence, but not because people are stupid, far from it. Some of the brightest people I’ve ever known are trying to figure out what the Japs will do next. Some people say that military intelligence is an oxymoron and, to some extent, they’re right. However, we’re like kids trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle but are never given all the pieces. Generally we’ve only got a few. From them we have to extrapolate what the whole picture is, and a lot of times it later turns out to be a picture of a cow instead of a tree. We do the best we can with what we have.”

“Like Kimmel and Short in Pearl Harbor?” Farris asked.

“Yes. They did what they thought best with the information on hand. They guessed wrong and paid for it with their reputations and thousands of American lives.”

“So they’re scapegoats?”

“That’s an opinion question, and here’s mine. Yes, they are scapegoats but only to a point. They willfully and foolishly didn’t cooperate with each other, and neither realized they were the equivalent of a frontier outpost surrounded by potentially hostile Apaches or Comanches. Instead, they continued to run the base like it was a country club in Virginia. They didn’t send out enough scout planes and did nothing to coordinate their defenses. If they’d been prepared and we’d fought like bandits, and still lost, they’d be heroes, tragic heroes, but still heroes. Maybe they didn’t know how to prepare for a war? Hell, I didn’t. Still don’t.”

Dane took another beer. “Look, here’s the problem with intelligence and the Japs. Even if they send radio messages, which they didn’t before Pearl Harbor, the important messages will be in code, which we can’t read, although I presume we’re trying to. Most communications aren’t encoded because they are routine, mundane, and unimportant, but are still in Japanese, which only a precious few, like me, can understand.”

“Is that why you’re on Spruance’s staff?”

“No, it’s because of my good looks. Yes, it’s because I can understand Japanese. There are literally tens of thousands of Americans who understand German, probably a lot more, but maybe only a few score who can do the same with Japanese and who can be trusted because their ancestry’s not Japanese. Nobody’s quite ready yet to enlist the help of local Japanese, although necessity might force that to change. So, even if we do intercept a radio message and manage to translate it, we find that most of them are innocuous, like requests for rations, complaints about the weather, and other stuff. Even if we find something referencing a future action, it’s going to refer to something like Plan Jupiter and Objective Fred. Then we have to figure out what Jupiter and Fred are.”

“Sounds like great fun,” Steve laughed.

“It’s a royal pain in the ass, which is why I finagled a day off to come out here. There’s no way I can succeed and provide the higher-ups with a clear picture. I convinced them I needed a break. At least I got promoted and my group now reports more to Nimitz than Spruance.”

Dane changed the subject and told about his trips on a submarine and the girl he’d met in Honolulu.

“Wow,” said Farris. “You really think it’s possible she’s trying to sail from Honolulu to here?”

“Yep.”

“Jesus, I’d like to meet her.”

“And I’d like to see her again.”

They cooked their steaks over a fire made of driftwood, ate, drank beer, and swam in the warm water, always staying in the shallows. Neither was a strong swimmer and they were concerned about tides and, of course, sharks. They talked about families and home, topics that seemed like they were from another galaxy. They only touched on their futures, since they would be in the military for the foreseeable future. Soldiers and sailors everywhere joked that they’d be discharged in just time to collect Social Security.

“I wonder when the war really will end,” Farris said.

“You think we should negotiate with the Japs?”

“Someday, we’ll have to,” Steve said. “I don’t think we should cave in to them, especially not after Pearl Harbor and all the other crap they’ve done to us, but yeah, sooner or later there’ll have to be some talks unless this is really going to be a second Hundred Years War.”

“They’ve kicked our asses up and down the street,” Dane said. “What should we give up in order to stop the killing and get our people back?”

His nephew jabbed the opener into the can of Budweiser and took a swallow. “I don’t know. Do we need the Philippines? Hell, we were going to turn them loose anyhow. Does it really matter who gets them next?”

“But we promised them independence, not brutality and slavery.”

“But, Tim, how many Americans will have to die to get those islands returned, just so we can give them away? Certainly we want to keep Hawaii and get Midway, Wake, and Guam back, and they sure as hell are going to have to pay for Pearl Harbor and all the atrocities, but I guess I can’t totally rule out negotiating with the little yellow bastards. Just count your fingers when you shake their hands and cover your ass when you bow.”

Steve belched before continuing. It was his fourth beer and he was starting to feel it. There hadn’t been all that much opportunity for serious drinking lately. “First of all, we’ve got to start winning some battles so we can bring them to the table. When the hell is that going to start?”