Where they might have taken four hours to cover the ground to the airshaft, he gave ’em two. It was still slow going, but to Denny it felt rushed.
Barbaro was his best guy on point. For an Italian city kid he was a natural in the jungle, and he adjusted to the increased tempo a lot better than Denny. The other men in his patrol, privates Stan Sanewski, Pete Hastings, and Gwynne Davis, had all done a year of jungle warfare training in northern Australia, and had spent the last six months spooking around the highlands of New Guinea, sharpening their edge against the remaining enemy forces down there.
Denny had come to understand something that Barbaro seemed to know instinctively. The jungle was neutral. It wasn’t your friend, or your enemy. It was just there and you had to deal with it, same as the Japs did. They had learned that the island was crisscrossed by paths, some of them wide enough for three men to walk down shoulder-to-shoulder. But although one ran right past the airshaft, Barbaro kept them off the track, something the instructors had emphasized in the training center Down Under.
The double-canopy jungle reached out for them with thorny creepers, gnarled roots, and stinging vines. The steep floor was a boggy mulch of rotting vegetation, crawling with snakes and centipedes. It threatened to give way in small localized mudslides at random intervals.
Once, they had to stop and wait while a twelve-man enemy patrol moved along the nearby path, just yards away. The terrain had forced them closer and closer to the track, which looped back on itself a couple of times as it descended. Barbaro waited until they could confirm that the Japanese had made it all the way down to the coastal plain. They had just moved off again when Pete Hastings hand-signed…
Stop.
Denny frowned, turning on the marine with a pissed-off expression. Hastings was pointing at something on the scarp above them, but glancing up there Denny couldn’t make out anything through the curtain of fat pandanus leaves and dense lianas. He showed Hastings his open palms and shrugged as if to say, So what?
The marine pointed up in the direction of the rock face again and silently mouthed, Look.
Denny had no idea what he was supposed to be looking at. Palm fronds, creaking tree trunks, thick stands of bamboo, a mess of creepers, all of them swaying in the breeze. He was about to tell Hastings to knock it off when the gray rock face moved. He shook his head like a kid seeing a magic trick for the first time.
The palm trees swayed again and he distinctly saw the supposedly solid gray rock flex in and out a couple of inches.
Goddamn, he thought.
The news from home was the best tonic Lieutenant Yukio’s men could have hoped for. There had been no official announcement of the grand admiral’s stunning counterstroke off Hokkaido, just as there had been no official announcement of the Russian attack on the Home Islands in the first place. But rumors traveled fast, even all the way down here, and as Yukio toured the eastern hangar from which he would begin his last flight in a matter of days, he noticed that the men went about their work with just a bit more snap in their steps and steel in their spines.
The treachery of the Communists, the technology of the Americans-in the end none of it was proof against the warrior spirit of the Nipponese fighting man. The gaijin went on with a lot of rubbish about loving life, but in the end they simply feared death and eschewed sacrifice. They were weak, and they would fail.
Yukio walked down the line of waiting Ohkas, stopping every now and then to share a word with a ground crew chief or one of the other pilots, some of whom had also quite obviously heard of news from Okhotsk. It was amazing how just a glimmer of hope could change a man’s whole outlook. Yukio had been assiduously tending to the men’s morale, as was his duty. And for the most part they had remained steadfast in the face of their approaching deaths. But now he could sense a real eagerness to launch themselves at the enemy. Everyone here knew that their sacrifice could make a real difference, and that was all they needed to dedicate themselves anew.
As he passed a rocket plane with its cowling open and three technicians messing about inside, he noticed a small sheet of paper by a toolbox at their feet. Someone had inscribed a few lines of poetry that seemed to sum up the feelings of everyone on the island.
Little clear streams rustle
Down through the mountain rocks
And finally let the battleship
Float on the sea.
Tiny drops of water they might be, as individuals, but together they would be a mighty flood sweeping their enemies away. One of the techs looked over his shoulder, his face lighting up as he recognized Sekio.
“A fine day for a walk, Lieutenant,” quipped Onada, the oldest and most experienced of the crew chiefs on the island. “So sunny, and such a fresh mild breeze.”
Yukio snorted at the joke. They were buried beneath millions of tons of rock. The cavernous space smelled of oil, rubber, chemicals, and body odor. And none of the ground technicians had felt the sun on his face for weeks.
“A fine day, indeed, Chief Onada. A fine day for it.” He smiled in reply. “No sign of our German comrades, then?”
“They are working in the southern cave this morning, Lieutenant. I cannot say I miss them. A surly bunch, those Germans. And only too happy to give the impression that they think themselves better than the emperor himself.”
Yukio made a helpless, accepting gesture. “What are we to do about it, Chief? We wouldn’t be here without their help.”
Onada pish-poshed the very idea with a grunt and the wave of a thick-fingered, oil-stained hand. A true nationalist, he simply would not hear of it. “Tinkerers and copycats, that’s all they are,” he insisted. “Anyone can copy the design for a rocket if they have the blueprint. But only a truly creative culture would devise a use for such things in the way that we have. And-”
The lieutenant essayed a dampening gesture with both hands. “You do not need to convince me, Chief Onada. I agree with you. But now I must continue my inspection. Has anyone checked the tunnels this morning?”
“Bah! You worry needlessly. Here is this morning’s real work,” Onada said, patting the dull white nose cone of the Ohka.
“Then I shall do it myself,” Yukio said. “I know you think it a waste of time, but what would happen if falling rocks blocked a launch rail, hmm? This whole base might be blown into the sky like Krakatoa. So I will check.”
He set off again, purposely striding toward the sheer rock wall at the end of the cavern. It was clear at the moment, but come launch day it would be a maze of cranes and gantries as the Cherry Blossoms were moved into place for takeoff.
It really wouldn’t do not to check the tunnels every day. They were effectively nothing less than the barrel of a gun out of which he and his men would fly at the Americans like human bullets, hopefully with the same success their comrades had enjoyed against the Bolsheviks.
And just like a good soldier, Yukio felt the need to clean and check his gun every day. So he headed for the closest of the steel ladders that led up to three circular openings about ten meters off the floor of the cave.
Looks like an old mine shaft or something, Denny thought.
The tunnel was obviously man-made. It was too regular to be a natural formation. A rough oval shape, it was much wider than it was tall. Chisel blows had disfigured the soft limestone walls, and two small rails ran downslope toward a much larger cavern beyond the tunnel mouth. It was well lit down there, and, he could see and hear that it was full of men and machinery.
Japs.
Denny’s heart hammered at the inside of his rib cage as he slowly inched downward, with Barbaro just behind him. What the hell the Japs were doing, he had no idea, but the rails had to be significant.