Yamamoto said nothing. He, too, had studied the conflicts of the coming decades, examining them for whatever insight they might give him regarding new opponents. And Onishi seemed to be forgetting that it was Americans like Kolhammer-possibly it even was Kolhammer-who had turned the Taiwan Straits into a mass grave for the Communist Chinese.
“Send me the full report on your preparations, Admiral,” Yamamoto said. “I should like to study it this afternoon, before I contemplate the final disposition of the fleet.”
“Hai!” Onishi barked in reply, firing off a series of commands to his juniors to see that a full briefing was made ready for the grand admiral.
Yamamoto returned to studying the map table again, stifling another sigh as he watched the noose tightening around his neck. To the south, MacArthur was straining at the leash with an Allied army of one and a half million men. To the west, China had collapsed into a civil war between the Nationalists and Mao’s Red Army, after the effective withdrawal of Japan from Manchuria. And to the east, somewhere to the east, Spruance was in the final days of building a titanic force, a fleet such as the world had never seen. An armada that could have swept aside the great Combined Fleet that Yamamoto had led to Midway, in the days before the Emergence.
He could not match that force.
But could he cripple it? Could he hurt it badly enough that his enemies might be delayed long enough to secure the empire?
Grand Admiral Yamamoto did not know.
D-DAY + 16. 19 MAY 1944. 1410 HOURS.
The camouflage was impressive, but that was no guarantee of success. The Americans enjoyed unbelievable advantages in surveillance technology.
Lieutenant Seki Yukio knew that his men could not afford to harbor any doubts about the success of their mission. Even so, he often found himself awake late at night, wondering whether they would even get off the ground. His inevitable death did not rob him of sleep. He had accepted that the moment he had agreed to Commander Tamai’s request that he lead the most important of the special attack forces, the tokubetsu kogeki tai. No, what concerned him was the prospect that they would be detected and destroyed before they were even airborne.
He walked around the Type 43 Ohka, running his hand over the smooth metallic surface. It felt cool in the tropical heat. Painted in a disruptive green jungle pattern on top and light blue underneath, it sat in a partially buried hangar under a canopy woven from palm fronds and jungle creepers. Arriving on the atoll by flying boat, he’d been unable to make out any sign of human habitation, let alone a military buildup. And once on the ground he understood why.
Years of work had gone into preparing this site. Walking around above ground level was strictly prohibited. Tunnels and caverns dug into the ancient, rock-hard coral protected the island’s defenders from prying eyes. There wasn’t even an airstrip in regular use. One had been constructed a year earlier, when the front line was a thousand miles away, but it was now covered by an ingenious system of wheeled garden beds-giant planter boxes on old vehicle chassis in which lay thousands of tons of soil, plants, and even wildlife. Come the day when they were ordered into the skies, the gardens would be pushed down a slightly cambered slope at the edge of the hidden runway. It was a brilliant ruse, and Yukio could only wonder who had come up with it.
Leaving the deadly aircraft behind him, he walked the length of the hangar to a sunken observation bunker near the water. He mopped at the greasy sheen of sweat on his brow and peered out to sea. The admiral’s seaplane was a faint speck to the north, growing larger as he watched. All of the garrison’s supplies arrived by seaplane or submarine, negating the requirement for an airstrip or any obvious docking facilities. In fact, there was a dock in a large, flooded cave on the far side of island, but it was rarely used.
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.