War of the Sun (35 page)

Mushi had fought in all the major campaigns of the Cult—this was by far the biggest. There were more than 320,000 Cult ground troops dug in all around the Waipio Peninsula which served as the lead-in for Pearl Harbor itself. Each Cult soldier was armed with a rifle, a sidearm, a sword, and a flare.

The swords and the flares weren’t standard combat issue. They were to be used in the inevitable celebration.

Mushi’s second-in-command rushed up to him, and in a dramatic fashion completely in keeping with the circumstances, announced boldly that the two temporary airstrips were finally completed. Mushi checked the time. It was now 0355. They had finished five minutes ahead of plan.

Mushi turned his attention now to the sky. Within a minute he heard a low, deep drone. He cocked his ear to the west and the noise became louder, stronger. He ordered his second-in-command to line up the surviving construction troops, telling them to light their flares. When this was done two minutes later, the two airstrips were brightly lit to allow aircraft to land.

Exactly one minute later, the first explosive-laden Zero bounced in for a successful landing. A great cheer went up from the exhausted construction troops. Right on its tail, another Zero landed, then another. Then another.

They kept coming, one right after another, nonstop for more than three hours. The construction troops went hoarse cheering for each arriving airplane, their hands burned and scarred from holding dozens of magnesium flares through the night.

More than one thousand Zeros would land before the rising sun began to light up the misty horizon.

And when the morning fog finally dissipated, and the first rays of the new sun appeared thirty minutes later, the Cult troops on the Waipio Peninsula and Pearl Harbor itself saw that the southern horizon was dotted with United American ships.

W
ARRIOR-SUPPORT CLASS PRIVATE OGASAWARA
Gunto was in trouble.

He was the driver of a truck which was laden with hot breakfasts for an entire section of the Cult AA-defense line located in and around the former USS
Arizona
memorial. He’d left the Cult’s one and only supply depot—Food and Water Distribution Center Number One, located near Halihi Hai Point—an hour before, 250 styrofoam containers filled with baked fish, boiled cabbage leaves, and reheated raisin pudding steaming in the back of his insulated truck.

His 14-mile trip along New Route 5 had been uneventful. But once he began the last long climb up Buckle Hill, the truck’s engine began acting up. It started with a slight backfire and then a long run of sputtering. One hundred feet from the peak of the hill, his overheat light blinked on. Fifty feet from the top, his oil light began flashing.

By the time he reached the summit, the truck had ground to a halt. Without enough lubrication to keep its cylinders moving, the engine had simply seized up. Gunto couldn’t get it to go forward or reverse, he couldn’t even get it going fast enough to roll either way down the hill.

He was stuck then, atop Buckle, looking down on the entire array of Cult positions in and around Pearl Harbor and the Waipio Peninsula.

From this vantage point, he would witness one of the most stunning battles in military history.

The sun was just coming up, and as the morning mist cleared, he could see many ships out on the southern horizon, apparently anchored on the far reaches of Mamala Bay. Down below him and off to the left, he could see a vast armada of green-winged Zeros taking off and forming a wide, slow-moving spiral high above Ford Island. To his right, another, even larger swarm of Zeros was growing over the temporary air base on the tip of the Pearl City Peninsula. And back even further to the east, a third spiral of Zeros was building over the place they used to call Hickam.

As Gunto watched, his mouth open in amazement, the three aerial spirals began to break up and then come together again in rigid chevron formations. He counted two hundred waves in all, each containing ten Zeros. Several flew right over his head, and he could clearly see their wings were heavy with bombs and other types of explosive canisters. Some even had torpedoes chained to the underbellies.

It was now 0710 hours. Suddenly all of the sirens in all of the Cult positions went off at once. Gunto most definitely heard a thunderous cheer arise as each of the nearly half-million Asian soldiers screamed full-throated allegiance to the Cult and the guiding spirit of Hashi Pushi, wherever he might be.

Then the sirens quieted down and the cheering stopped. At that moment the enormous formation of explosive-filled Zeros dramatically turned south toward the vast fleet of United American ships.

Gunto didn’t know what to do. If he chose to follow proper orders, then he should make his way to the nearest Cult position and radio for help to fix his truck. But he knew he couldn’t do that. Not now.

He had to stay and watch nothing less than destiny itself unfold.

The first wave of Zeros arrived over the enemy fleet after only two minutes of flying time. Suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch, the entire American fleet was lit up with the flashes of antiaircraft fire. Like long orange fingers, the streaks of AA fire climbed into the morning sky toward the great waves of Zeros. The noise from this sudden combined fusillade was ear-splitting even for Gunto on Buckle Hill, ten miles away.

Then, in little more than a flash and a glint of sunlight, the Zeros began dropping one by one. Gunto saw the first kamikaze hit; it went up in a great flash of fire and smoke, impacting on the bow of a cargo ship no more than four miles offshore. The helpless vessel rose up out of the water, so violent was the impact, slamming back down and breaking in two. No sooner had this happened than two more Zeros slammed into it. There were two more loud booms, and then the ship was gone.

The Zeros swarmed down on the next in-line ship, wielding their way through the wall of AA gunfire. This ship, too, was hit in the front, then the rear, then in the center. It exploded at once—possibly it was carrying explosives—and was gone in a great rush of flame and steam, the delayed sounds of explosion reaching Gunto’s position a few seconds later.

The cascade of suicidal Zeros continued. A third ship was hit by three kamikazes simultaneously; a fourth was struck by two planes directly on its port side, capsizing it immediately. A fifth sustained five direct hits before quickly sinking after the sixth.

On and on it went, the kamikazes diving into the American ships, flashing through the wall of AA streaks, steering true to their targets with deadly, suicidal precision. The sounds of explosions were buffeting Gunto now, the very force of explosions and death were in the hot morning wind.

Gunto was cheering wildly at first. This, he was told by his commanders, was the ultimate revenge against the lazy and despised United Americans, the culmination of a trap set by the Cult by evacuating the West Coast and its South Pacific bases and drawing the Americans into a trap at Pearl Harbor. But as the aerial massacre continued for five minutes, then ten, then fifteen full minutes, Gunto felt the enthusiasm drain out of him. The very scale of the suicide attacks and the destruction they caused became numbing. The Zeros were crashing into the American ships with a precision that was as perverse as it was effective. Despite the huge wall of AA fire being thrown up by the Americans, it appeared as if just about every Zero was getting through and destroying its target.

It lasted more than twenty minutes.

By then the horizon was littered with burning, dying American ships. Many of them, like helpless, crippled fish, belching smoke and flames, either sinking, or spinning wildly out of control.

Gunto had ceased cheering long ago. Now all he could feel was the lump in his throat and a weight on his chest. Even though he was a dedicated member of the Cult, the one-sidedness of what he’d witnessed was sickening. As many as two thousand Cult pilots would sacrifice themselves, it was true. But the destruction they wrought was simply staggering. Gunto figured that each enemy troopship contained at least a thousand men, probably many more. Now, as he studied the sinking and dying ships, he felt tears form in his eyes as his calculations told him that more than 200,000 United American soldiers were either dead or drowning.

This was not war, he thought. This was wholesale slaughter and he could watch it no more.

Tears streaming down his face simply as a protest against man’s wrenching inhumanity toward other men, he turned on his well-worn heel and started walking back down Buckle Hill.

The Cult had only one helicopter unit on Oahu, a three-ship squadron consisting of ageless UH-1s Hueys and dedicated almost exclusively to hit-and-run terror raids and behind-the-lines reconnaissance.

Their unit name was the Flying Dragons, and today their mission would be different.

Confident that the United Americans would be wiped out by the relentless, suicidal kamikaze attacks, the Cult High Command was actually concerned that no American ship would be left floating, and therefore there would be no prize of war with which to commemorate what was surely growing into the Cult’s finest hour.

So the High Command had ordered the Flying Dragons to chopper into the midst of the battle, attack one of the American ships, seize it, and keep it afloat during the battle.

This way, the Cult would have their trophy.

The three helicopters left a small base on Ford Island ten minutes into the murderous kamikaze raid. Flying at wavetop level, they flew right into the heart of the battle, dodging pieces of exploding ships, and kamikazes alike, the smoke and flames so thick they could barely see the individual American ships, never mind their desperate and dying crews. It took another five minutes of this weaving and incredibly perilous flying before the commander of the Dragons was able to select an appropriate ship to seize.

He found one right in the middle of the fleet, a mid-sized cargo vessel whose only damage so far appeared to be to its rudder and communications tower. Flying in the lead Dragon, the commander directed his Hueys to the rear of the smoke-obscured ship, where its helicopter platform was still intact. The commander’s Huey slammed down to a landing, the sixteen troops crowded inside bursting out, their weapons firing in all directions.

The two other Dragon choppers came right in after the first, their pilots firing small rocket barrages along either side, being careful not to actually hit the ship’s superstructure and thereby damage the precious war trophy.

Within twenty seconds, all forty-eight of the Flying Dragons were down and running through the ship, wildly firing their weapons, and hurling flash grenades at a host of imaginary targets.

The scene was so wild, it took the commander of the boarding force a minute or so to figure out that something was very wrong on the ship.

Gunto’s feet were killing him by the time he walked the last mile to his base.

He’d thought he’d been lucky when, shortly after reaching the bottom of Buckle Hill, he was able to catch a ride with another truck from Food and Water Facility Number One returning from its morning chow run. The two crewmembers had also watched the
kamikaze
attack on the American fleet, and they were ecstatic. They were absolutely convinced that this battle was the beginning of the Cult’s eventual world domination. With the United Americans out of the way, there was nothing stopping the Greater East Asian Warriors’ Association from turning the planet into one big red Rising Sun meatball.

Still shaken from what he’d seen from the top of Buckle Hill, Gunto was actually coming around to their point of view when suddenly their truck broke down. The crewmen glanced under the hood and declared the truck was out of gas.

Gunto considered this a very bad omen.

He agreed to walk the final mile back to the food and water depot, leaving the pair of true believers with their broken-down truck and dreams of world conquest to wait for assistance.

The holes on Gunto’s boots were breaking old blisters with new ones when he finally turned the corner of the last bend and saw the entrance to Food and Water Facility Number One before him. It was no surprise that the place was in an uproar as the Cult supply soldiers celebrated news of the kamikaze attack on the United American fleet.

The guards at the front gate were practically waltzing together, their weapons discarded, cups of
sake
in hand. Walking through the entranceway and into the large storage facility, Gunto saw dozens of small celebrations going on throughout the place.
Sake
and beer were flowing freely, and martial music was being pumped out at twice the normal volume over the loudspeaker system. All semblance of work had stopped at the place, which eventually would be a problem. As the one and only food and water supply depot on the island servicing the vast Cult army, remaining in operation twenty-four hours a day was essential. If not, some unit somewhere would either miss a food run or get one late, and then the whole distribution system would be out of whack.

But no one on hand seemed to be worried about that at the moment.

Gunto went to the motor pool, reported the demise of both his truck on Buckle Hill and the second truck a mile away, and then walked to his barracks. It was empty—the seventy-two other men he slept with were somewhere out on the grounds, undoubtedly getting drunk and celebrating.

With no commanders to give him orders, Gunto simply grabbed a bowl of rice from the chow hall and walked to the end of the facility, where a sea wall provided its eastern perimeter.

He sat there eating the starchy rice with his dirty fingers. The racket from the victory party behind him combined with the blaring, squeaky military music was enough to hurt his ears. Gunto couldn’t really blame his comrades for celebrating. He would have been right there with them if he hadn’t seen what he’d seen from Buckle Hill. As it was, he was suffering from the first pangs of conscience he’d ever experienced in his thirty-eight years. If this was how the Cult planned to conquer the world—by conducting not battles but deceptive wholesale slaughters—then they would have to do it without him. As soon as he was shipped back to Japan for leave, he planned to go AWOL.